How did you write this painfully beautifully insightful song about passing over into the next life? This is my favourite Of your online versions I could find but the best by far is your stampede city sessions concert version of this. The violin/fiddle is lovely but it’s usually too loud in the mix of most of the recordings, I want to hear the vocal up in the mix. The official version has a video I cannot watch because the flickering and flitting images will trigger migraines (could trigger epilepsy in some people too). I want to tell you my story - why this song means so much to me - I had had your Stampede city session (Calgary) concert from 2019 on my DVR box to listen to you guys for the first time, but had not had a chance to listen to it, and then my beloved father died quite unexpectedly in February this year, (not from Covid). I managed (they allowed two of us) one COVID rules sanctioned visit at the hospital the night before, but we didn’t know whether it would be our last. Hours later the doctors called me in the middle of the night to say he was breathing his last, and I have been haunted by the image of him taking his last breath, without me at his side. I was unable to play this song and get through it, for months after that, without breaking down sobbing, when the chorus came on. Maybe it will always have that effect. And yet it is also strangely comforting the way you have written it, the imagery “I”m coming home, leave the light on, …., I will see you all there…. and the imagery around the luminous veil, and the great exhale. I am drawn to the intimate, personal way you perform it. I want to thank you Great Lake Swimmers for putting words out there which speak to my terrible grief and managing to embed it in a philosophical and deep, beautifully done musical vignette about the questions and imaginings we all have about mortality and eternity.
