Reid Zoé is one third of Toronto based band Sleeping Bees, but ‘When I Go‘ is a song from her soon to arrive (June 4th) debut solo EP ‘Shed My Skin.‘ And it may sound a little like a folk downer with its opening lines “When I go what will I take to the grave? / When I go what will you save ?“, but actually it’s a meditation on acceptance and oneness with nature. As Reid Zoé explains: “On the surface, ‘When I Go’ is a song about dying- but it’s really all of the questions that come with being a human on this earth. It’s the acceptance that we don’t know everything, and that that’s okay. We are part of everything. It’s about the joy that can come with the realization that ‘nothing really matters.”
That acceptance shines through in the lines “For all that it’s worth we just go back to the earth and the same rules apply for all the birds in the sky and all the stars when they die.” It’s a pretty sentiment, but call us pedantic (you won’t be the first, you won’t be the last) it’s not actually the case for stars – they have a range of ends depending on their original mass, but ultimately for most they perform the favour for life of sending out billions of tonnes of material into space to form – well, everything. As another Canadian once sang “we are stardust, we are golden.” And that’s a comfort too.
Photo: Andy Ince
