The Red River - "The Birds and the Boats"
The Red River - "The Birthday Song"

Canada turned 140 on Sunday and I, like most Quebecers, celebrated by moving house. What began as a humanitarian effort to save tenants from the inconvenience and indignity of being evicted and left without a place to go during the winter, has persisted in the quaint form of Quebec's Moving Day. Every July 1, while the rest of the country drinks Molson beer and oohs at firework displays, Quebecers pack up and move out, en masse. The sight of streets shut down by tens of behemoth moving vans, hundreds of sweat soaked men and women dragging dollies overloaded with cardboard boxes - themselves filled mostly with junk - underscores the surreality that is the interswitching of dwelling places we call Déménagement.

I write this from my new writing place. I used to write on a big white desk, facing a wall and bulletin board with important numbers I never called and menus for pizza restaurants I often did. Now I write on a small red table, facing an open window through which I currently see a woman on a bench on the street a storey below. She's wiping what is either blood or ice cream from her knee with a napkin. Beyond, I can see two trees of equal height, separated by about ten feet - one is full and forest green, the other sparse and the colour of iceberg lettuce. They're swaying in the wind, always, unfailingly in time with The Red River's new ep, On Your Birthday. This is weird, I know; I've listened to the ep three times through now to make sure.

Past the trees, my sightline extends forever. I can see rolling green hills tens of miles away, and Maine beyond them. With a good pair of binoculars and a strategically placed mirror, I could probably see all the way to California, where The Red River's Bill Roberts would be ever so carefully recording an acoustic guitar with a four track.

Roberts, like his clear inspiration Phil Elvrum, writes songs about people and about nature and songs about people disguised as songs about nature, and in so doing necessarily confronts our relative and absolute impermanence. People change, people falter, people die; the sea keeps flowing, the mountains keep standing, the sky keeps watch overhead.

But then, as Roberts knows, the distinctions are not always so easily delineated. As much as people change, they don't; as much as they falter, they are redeemed; as much as they die, they live on.

Moving is like a birthday in that it confronts one simultaneously with an end and a beginning. All that we bring from the old to the new - our books, our records, our friends and family - is a tether, tying us to ourselves; but at the same time, our new stomping ground promises a new us, the us who will have lived here in this as of yet unexplored place.

The Red River's new work is less joyful than his previous one, last year's Some Songs About a Flood. Roberts's ep is sadder and more contemplative than his earlier effort, though not without hope. If he were a sea, he would be slightly drained, but still flowing; if he were a mountain, he'd be eroded, but still standing. After all, to paraphrase the philosopher, you can't step in the same Red River twice.

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