Songbook: The Lyrics and Music of Steven Heighton

By Steven Heighton and Ginger Pharand

From the award-winning, multi-genre author and musician Steven Heighton, Songbook brings together Heighton’s lyrics and music for the first time in a single volume, including his final songs, which have never been heard or seen until now. When Steven Heighton died suddenly of cancer in 2022, he was in the middle of an intensely creative period of songwriting. He released his first album of original material, The Devil’s Share, in 2021 and was preparing to record his second album. Known first as a poet, Heighton had always held that “music and poetry are two words for the same thing.”

As in his songwriting, in Songbook, Heighton moves fluidly between genres and subjects, from political songs like “The Butcher’s Bill,” about the carelessness of nations sending their youth to war, to reimagining the myth of Orpheus (“I'll hold my breath the whole way down / And find your soul in the undertown”), to blues tunes like “Last Living Woman Alive,” and a tribute to the late John Prine, the “Buddha of Song.” With chords accompanying the lyrics, readers and musicians have the ability to bring the songs to life with their own interpretations. The music in Songbook was the final work of Heighton’s life, and it is not only a gift to have his lyrics and chords but an invitation from Heighton himself, challenging his readers to answer the call and keep singing along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781778523007

Steven Heighton

STEVEN HEIGHTON (1961-2022)’s most recent books were the novel The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep (Hamish Hamilton, 2017), the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poetry collection The Waking Comes Late (House of Anansi Press, 2016), and the memoir Reaching Mithymna (Biblioasis, 2020), which was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He was also the author of the novel Afterlands, which was published in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and was a “best of year” selection from ten publications in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The novel was optioned for film by Pall Grimsson. His other poetry collections include The Ecstasy of Skeptics and The Address Book. His fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, have appeared in the London Review of Books, Tin House, Poetry, Brick, the Independent, the Literary Review, and The Walrus Magazine, among others; have been internationally anthologized in Best English Stories, Best American Poetry, The Minerva Book of Stories, and Best American Mystery Stories; and have won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Award, the K. M. Hunter Award, the P. K. Page Founders’ Award, the Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, and four gold National Magazine Awards. In addition, Heighton was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, the Moth Prize, and Britain’s W. H. Smith Award. Heighton was also a fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He lived in Kingston, Ontario. In 2021, Wolfe Island Records released an album of his songs, The Devil’s Share. To listen, visit www.wolfeislandrecords.com/stevenheighton. 

Book preview

Cover: Songbook: The Lyrics and Music of Steven Heighton by Steven Heighton with an introduction by Ginger Pharand.

Songbook

The Lyrics and Music of Steven Heighton

Steven Heighton

Introduction by Ginger Pharand

Logo: E C W Press.

Contents

Introduction

The Devil’s Share

The Devil’s Share

When You Finally Learn to Love

When You Finally Learn to Love Reprise

Don’t Remember Me

Sometimes Even Liars Tell the Truth

2020 (Cohen’s Future)

Six Months at the Worst

One Breath

Another Kind of Worse

The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep

Always Almost Leaving

New Year’s Song

New Songs

Read the Sign

Buddha of Song

Too Soon to Go

The Meteor of the War

The Butcher’s Bill

Still Ain’t Misbehavin’

Want It All on Credit

Looking Back

Orpheus

(Still Mean to) Make Your Way Across

Jacob’s Angel

The Last Living Woman Alive

Coda

About the Authors

Copyright

Introduction

Long Road Home to the Forbidden Technique, or Finding Freedom in Constraint

This book is a new relation to the 2011 ECW title Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing. In Workbook, Steve shared thoughts on the creative life, writing as a profession, and advice he wished he could give to his younger self. A decade later, as part of his writer-in-residence position at Athabasca University, he published the text of a keynote speech, The Virtues of Disillusionment, which tracked, among other ideas, the distance in years between when he first perceived the advice for his younger self and when he finally began to live by it.He had begun, finally he said, to embrace the great lyric from Mahalia Jackson to live the life I sing about in my songs. It was more than a metaphor. For Steve, it meant committing himself to writing music after years of channelling that impulse into his poetry and prose. This songbook should not be viewed as a departure from his literary legacy into a final artistic desire line, but a convergence, an invitation to formally meet the music that was in him and his work all along.

Steve was a creative polyglot from the start. Not only a precociously skilled visual artist, one especially gifted at caricatures and quick ink sketches, he also completed his first novel at age ten on a plastic typewriter his parents had given him. His father, John, recalls that Steve emerged from his bedroom one evening and requested a ride to the Toronto offices of McClelland & Stewart, where, Steve explained, he’d sent his manuscript and they wanted to speak with him about it. His father obliged, and Steve sat in one of the press’s offices with an editor and listened to the critique with the same seriousness about his work he retained all his life. He politely thanked everyone for their time and returned home to his desk and the edits! Despite this promising and focused early commitment to writing, it was in music that he found creative passion. A quiet, bookish child most comfortable in his room drawing and reading and studying the globe, Steve’s introduction to language as a lyric art came through his father’s dramatic recitations of poetry and, even more impressively to Steve, a vast repertoire of songs.

My father was a human jukebox. Cue him with a request while he was driving and he’d quote verse by anyone from Robert Service to Emily Dickinson, or sing songs by anyone from Paul Robeson to Cream. He made the forms seem interchangeable. And when he quoted poems like The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens or The Highwayman, he recited so rhythmically and melodically they might as well have been sung.

If that description is familiar, maybe you once encountered Steve himself when he was holding a guitar. A serious listener as well as a musician, he could play back almost any song pitched to him. On the rare occasions he didn’t already know the song, he would study a singer or fellow player (or ask to hold a cell phone