Story Behind The Song

One night, a long, long time ago, we were sitting around a bonfire at Lac St. Anne in Northern Alberta, when a "spotlight" suddenly appeared in the night sky. As we all sat drunkenly supposing what it might be, the light abruptly burst across the northern

Song Description

Northern Lights is a 3/4 time waltz (percusion and classical folk instrumentation) with a great story about an Electrician who falls in love with a coal miner's daughter. This Alberta based story references real places and real facts about the way open-pi

Lyrics

Northern Lights
Words and Music by Rob Oswin

They say a coal miner's daughter is a good friend indeed,
Cuz' her papa might land you the job that you need.
If you pass his inspection, your ticket he'll read,
Cuz' every coal mine is measured by the lips that it feeds.
Now I work in the shop at Wabamum Lake.
I'm another electrician with coal miners pay.
After fixin' equipment for the men in the pit,
We'll head out to the Gainford and we'll all drink a bit.

Let's drink to wide open spaces and familiar faces
And fishing through holes in the ice.
Towards the Lac St. Anne mission,
It's the Whitewood we're fishing,
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern Lights!

Well my father before me, and his before he,
Standing deep in the hole, before turning fifteen,
They were working for peanuts, and breaking their backs,
Til along came the Sundance and Wabamum's Stacks.
So the next generation, new to the game,
Built these generator stations a stone's throw away.
And the drag-lines made mountains of coal disappear,
We'll move more in a week than they could in a year
While the miners keep diggin', we tend to the riggin'
We work hard but we won't work for free.
We'll make union decisions and constant revisions,
So the Steelworkers deep in the seam, can keep chasing those coal miners' dreams.

Let's drink to wide open spaces and familiar faces
And fishing through holes in the ice.
Towards the Lac St. Anne mission,
It's the Whitewood we're fishing,
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern Lights!
Turning coal into diamonds and northern lights!

With computers' compassion the scheduler's forms
Have the lasers surveying the prospector's dorms,
And the coal miner's daughter is pregnant again,
While the Whitewood's exhausted in 2010.
If we've learned from the past, no coal mine outlasts
The son of a coal miner's daughter,
Since the Genesee's breached guess we'll leave Seba Beach
Cuz' we'll never make blood out of water ... And we'll never make coal out of stone.
But I married that coal miner's daughter, guess we're leaving our Wabamum loam.

Let's drink to wide open spaces and familiar faces
And fishing through holes in the ice.
Towards the Lac St. Anne mission,
It's the Whitewood we're fishing,
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern Lights!
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern lights!
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern lights!
Turning coal into diamonds and Northern lights!

Northern lights! Northern lights! Northern lights!

© 2003 Rob Oswin (aka RAW Boswin)
Contact Rob Oswin at 403-289-8532 or email Rob@RobOswin.com