Heroine is such a neat, pretty, wistful little pop composition that it transcends my own mnemonic association with one of the darkest, unhappiest periods of my life, my time as a corporate lawyer working on mammoth transactions for a Bay Street law firm. It was the late 1990s, and we were on a deal involving industrial facilities in a relatively obscure locale up in northern Alberta, named, confusingly, Fort Saskatchewan, on account of being located not in the adjacent Province, but on the Saskatchewan river – by the by, you know you’re close to straying off the map when you’re in a town called “Fort” something – and it was high summer. We were there over the solstice, and it was far enough north that the sun didn’t go down until after 11 at night, and was back up by about 4 in the morning. It all comes flooding back to me when I hear this song, the unbelievably long hours at the client’s facility, eating every night at a local watering hole called Gus’s (where once a week, on Thursdays, the featured entertainment was a troupe of itinerant strippers), being screamed at and denigrated by one of the client’s angry minions, who was unhappy with the speed with which we were working, the endless churning of documents, the brain fog of sleep deprivation, a particular night among many when we worked through until dawn, when I sat on a curb with my colleague at the motel where we were all staying, watching the sun come up at 4:15 AM. We were there for weeks. In one six day span I billed 121 hours, 121 billables, no padding, and you know, there are only 144 hours in six days. Multiply 6 x 24. One hundred and forty-four, that’s all there are, and I was up and working for all but 23 of them. Throughout, whichever radio station we were able to receive up there was playing Heroine in heavy rotation, and I heard it again and again, loving it every time, just as I still love it, to the point that it’s woven into the memory of all that grief and stress and exertion and exhaustion in a way that softens the recollection. It was horrible, but there was camaraderie, shared purpose, a powerful feeling of being on a team and having each other’s backs, and now, going on 30 years later, I hear Heroine and remember the whole shit show fondly. Swear to God, I was practically ready to kill myself at the time, but now I look back and miss the sense of belonging. I miss the crew. Heroine makes me nostalgic for an interlude of abject misery.
The mind is a strange thing.
It’s an enigmatic song, written in G, which is supposed to evoke feelings of joy, contentment, and grateful satisfaction; as one on-line source puts it, G is “everything rustic, idyllic and lyrical, every calm and satisfied passion, every tender gratitude for true friendship and faithful love,–in a word every gentle and peaceful emotion of the heart is correctly expressed by this key.” Perhaps, generally, and I wouldn’t argue that Heroine is anything but calm, gentle, and tender, but this time there’s a powerful undercurrent of melancholy disappointment that overwhelms anything idyllic. This is an account of broken romance and failed striving, in which the protagonist admits to having tried just about everything to make it work, of having been willing to assume any persona, play any role – fool, drowning person, or heroine – in the effort to be what was wanted. All for nothing. In a moving, poetic turn of phrase, the singer describes how she’s wound up “sitting on the steps of our mistake”, as if their romance was a tangible place, something they tried to build, a home where they both might have lived, now lying in ruins. She said she loved and needed him, but she was wrong. That was a sunny restful Sunday. Now it’s a dreary mid-week Wednesday. Time to move on.
the needlefish 