When people complained about Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature because “lyrics aren’t literature,” they betrayed their ignorance about literature. Some of the earliest writings in the Western canon, including the Bible’s Book of Psalms, originated as song lyrics. The word “psalm” itself is derived from the Greek word meaning music and, by extension, the lyrics that accompany it.
John K. Samson, the Winnipeg punk/poet-turned-folk rocker who formed the Weakerthans in 1997 after leaving the punk band Propagandhi, surely knows this — he’s taught creative writing at Canadian universities and is widely praised for his lyrics. They aren’t flashy, though you’ll seldom hear “benediction” in a pop song, but they pile up prosaic images until they reach poignancy. And sure enough, by giving it the form of supplication set to music, Samson wrote a secular psalm.
Let the waitress put the chairs up
Let the glasses that you broke
Form a picture of our leader
With a halo made of smoke
Let the golden oldies station crackle and come through
With a final benediction we’ll hum along to
Before we say goodnight
Let our talk about the ballgame
And the weather show we care
Like a sound we didn’t notice
Until it stopped and left us there
With the traffic and our heartbeats beating in straight time
Let our hatred and affection march in the same line
Before we say goodnight
Oh protect our secret handshake once more, with feeling
Let the toast to absent members push through the ceiling
Before we say goodnight
The song appeared on the Weakerthans’ most successful LP, 2003’s “Reconstruction Site.” The band has been on hiatus since 2014, though Samson has released some solo work since then.
The video won awards in Canada. Shot in the clubhouse of the Winnipeg German Society, it features a quartet of older musicians standing in for the Weakerthans. They aren’t actors — they were stalwarts of Winnipeg’s music scene. The George Reznick jazz trio (pianist Reznick is the one who mouths “before we say goodnight” in the video) and blues guitarist Brent Parkin had been playing clubs in Western Canada since before any of the Weakerthans were born.
