chariot

come carry me home

Seems it’s become a personal tradition to publicly journal on December 20th each year. It might make more sense to mark my remission date one year later, but today is 15 years since checking into Princess Margaret. Neil Alive: Pt 2 (Anniversary Edition).

So here we are, again sharing words that can’t begin to:

- encompass the love I still feel from then, for and from my friends and loved ones
- express how that time connected me to a brimming well of gratitude
- explain… any of it

So instead, let’s give an old song a new life.

Up today exclusively on Bandcamp. If you buy Chariot there, I’ll donate what I get to Princess Margaret or another patient-support initiative that helped me then and are still helping others now.

Please also consider donating blood if you’re able to. A small act with big impact.

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I rang in 2005 in Hamilton, but only have one translucent memory of it.

I’m sitting in the backseat of a parked car, drunk, impatient and angrily waiting on my taxi driver to… get back in, I guess?

After a time, either Josie or Boyce yanked me out of the stranger’s empty car I’d let myself into and held me upright until the real cab they called came to take me home.

I can still be embarrassed about a moment like that, but I rediscovered Chariot recently and remembered it helped me forgive myself. The song broods so the moment can breathe, and the blunder has become funny and formative instead. After all these years it still surprises me that songs can do that.

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I’d moved to Toronto 5 years before. My music was still on training wheels but I was brazenly asking to get on every bill and inspired by everything. Any time I heard a yes, an interesting night out or a new friend followed and I was planting seeds for so much future joy.

I worked at the info desk at a chain CD store on Queen W. and eventually figured out my two funny co-workers - Misha Bower and Isla Craig - were also other-worldly sirens. Ideas started sprouting.

Likely Misha and I have now sung more hours together overall, but Isla was the first to unlock singing for me as, we clumsily learned and taught each other our songs. Isla’s harmony on Chariot is one I’d never have come to myself, and she did that often.

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A year after the empty cab ride, our other MB sent me a salacious subject line:

A few weeks later, that birthday party had 15 of the truest and bluest piled onto my bed to clap and sing with Isla & I.

Now, the song belonged to more of us.

After recording, more singing and acting out. Looking at Matt’s DV screencaps, it seems impossible these formative memories happened on the same night. Feels like a flash now, but it must have been a long, late one if we fit in all this energy.

The song has fallen in and out of my set for 20 years since. Somewhere there, Chris Reineck took a shining to it and pushed it to a mix and master, but it still took until this pensive moment - right now - thinking about life and love to finally let me let the song belong to you too.

After you listen and perhaps buy the Bandcamp version…

Come back and listen to the joy of this practice round!

You might not see/hear yourself in this moment with us in 2006, but I hope you have one like it to think fondly about. One that captures the people you love in (figurative or literal) harmony with one another.

When the hard stuff happens, all this soft stuff is a mighty offset.

Thanks for reading and listening this year, and here’s to our happy health and well-being at the end of 2025. Love you!