Oyster, the 1995 release by Heather Nova, ranks amongst my very favorite albums. My first experience listening to it was one of disconnected disappointment, as I had enjoyed the album's single, Walk This World, but began to realize that the album was going to demand more of me than I expected. For whatever reason, her sweet banshee voice (not an oxymoron if you listen closely) brought me back and made me sit down and really dig into the album. I realized it had to be listened to in order, starting with track one and moving forward, following her own pacing of the songs. They were setting me up, and in 1995, the crossroads my own life was facing made too many of the songs hit home.

Heather Nova wrote all the music on the album, and it borders on following a single storyline. Is it her story or is it the work of observation? My own writing flirts between the two, so I saw no reason why hers could not. What follows are the tracks of this five star album and some of the lyric highlights and my own obtuse commentary. I highly recommend it.

Walk This World

You come into this album with a bang, and most people I knew who heard this song on the radio made much of the point that she chants I want you to come... repeatedly in the chorus. Well, the album is littered with both strong and underhanded sexual references that accentuate running themes. It is no mistake that the opening track is the one most obvious in doing this.

And it's burning in our fingers and it's burning on the road
And I like the way you're broken and I'll like you when you're old
And I see you in the garden and I feel you plant the seed
I want you to come walk this world with me

This sets the stage for the rest of the album and the recurring themes play upon this verse in the opening track. You begin to wonder what really happened to Heather Nova when she spent all those years on that boat sailing around Bermuda.

Heal

Thought of by many as the weakest link on the album, and definitely a come down after Walk This World. This is the point where you think you may have been had and that you're going to now be treated to an onslaught of sensitive guitar strumming girl music. The fact that Heather sometimes sounds like she is crying the lyrics of the song doesn't help the impression. Yet, in the context of the album, this is a key track. This is the calm before the storm. This is the reflection.

And the sea glistens
And the waves pull us in
There's something rising up and up

Island

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program. The siren song that opens this track is annoying the first time you hear it, but haunting on further investigation. Unlike the first two tracks, this song puts a story in motion rather than play upon vague and easily re-translated concepts. There is no shortage of specifics that all too many can relate to.

There are parts of me he'll never know,
my wild horses and river beds,
and in my throat voices he'll never hear.

He pulls at me like a cherry tree,
and I can still move but I don't speak about it.

Pretend I'm crazy, pretend I'm dead.
He's too scared to hit me now
he'll bring flowers instead

It may have just been me, since at the time of this album's release I was learning that a number of women I loved and cared about had suffered much abuse at the hands of trusted and close friends and family members. My childhood best friend had gone AWOL from the Army in order to exact revenge on his father for his systematic rape of his children by putting a gun in his mouth out in his father's backyard. There was so much information and I foolishly thought this album would offer some light escape.

And I don't know why I can't tell my sister,
He spat in my face again,
and I don't want to die here.
You know that dream when your feet won't move,
you want to come but your body won't let you.
He steals it from me.
He steals it from me.
It shines like sweat, like jewels, like something that has died too soon.
He fucks with the beauty.
A kiss, a kick, a kiss, a kick, a kiss kiss kick.
He steals it from me.
It's out of my hands again.

Throwing Fire At The Sun

The other single to be released from Oyster, this track packs the same kind of punch as the opening track. In the context of the album, it is the reaching out, the attempt to find kindred souls in the world outside. Yet it screams about the difficulty in connecting, the pain of disappointment and how it can be so much easier to hide away and not make those connections. The title is a metaphor for the experience of trying to connect and create something special in a world that doesn't seem to care. Love never changed anything in the world, or did it?

If I listen there's something deeper that speaks.
If we reach out maybe we could make a little peace.

Maybe An Angel

For me, this track makes a different kind of sense outside the context of the album and makes less sense to me personally within the context of the album. Is it a song of rescue, of failed hope, or our inability to truly reach our potential. When I first bought the album, I listened to this track almost exclusively because of its meaning to me. It is a beautiful song and lays the foundation of pain and disappointment that sets up the next track.

I put my hands where your wings should be
I put my feet where the earth should be
And I can't see very far
And when you said that you were dead I hung on

Something I feel
You are an angel, or maybe you could've been
Something out here
You are an angel, or maybe you could've been

I met Heather Nova a little less than a year before this album was released. At the time I thought she was a roadie for the main act. I didn't realize she was the opening act. I was there as a guest of the road manager for the opening act, and I had coffee with Heather, having no idea who she was. I remember I kept telling her that I was dead, and telling her bits and pieces of my story. Sometimes, when I've had a few too many drinks, I think that this song is about me.

See how they run
And nobody's saying "go"

Sugar

If you've ever listened to a song and been disappointed that it failed to live up to its potential because it meandered around the point and never got past that, this is the song for you. The first time I really listened and understood what she was talking about I felt that tinge in my chest. Beginning perfectly with a quiet guitar and Heather singing a sweet little story about childhood, you settle in for the story.

On the Vermont Transit bus I leaned my arm into a little chink of sun,
going somewhere older than I was,
strapped into something tight,
keeping me small.
I dug in to you like rock climbing;
too scared of coming down,
too scared of going up,
too scared of rockface.
I should've split my sides or spilled my guts or hit you or something,
but I was good.
And your father's little pancakes so round and perfect and me sitting up straight,
laughing in wrong places,
kissing you,
kissing up,
kissing too soon.

If you are paying attention you'll realize she isn't talking about a nice little bus trip through Vermont like you might be led to believe if you are only half paying attention. There is something going on here and the idyllic guitar strumming is giving you a false sense of security. Then chaos kicks in.

And when you got me pregnant
I stopped the party
and I stopped the typewriter
and I stopped your dumb ball game in the red barn
and I stopped your father and bled instead.
And I felt the lie - something sticky on the inside,
a bitter wind in my throat,
stopping me wanting,
in my stomach,
in my head and you said
"Sugar sugar, you couldn't come, come
Sugar sugar, without your mother
Sugar sugar, you couldn't taste it
Sugar sugar, in my throat."


When the morning comes, where will I go?

Truth And Bone

The next moment of peace on the album comes here, a much stronger track than Heal but there is a renewed energy towards peace. Throughout the album Heather is showing herself as a powerful voice for "she who has reasons why she cannot be close to you." Well acted or lived through has always been a matter of debate, but the words have always echoed those I have known who live with what I call "black widow syndrome." The plea comes forth and the attempt is made, but it always fall short. Peace is not so easy.

My mouth is full of secrets I'm too afraid to tell
My body's longing for you to know me well
I move through the day in the rhythms that I've known
I've got this crazy dream of stripping down to truth and bone

Many of us share the same dream, but it is always more complicated than it sounds.

Blue Black

Unfortunately, this is one of those songs that is so much stronger lyrically than it comes across musically. The potential of the song was unfulfilled and the lyrics themselves feel edited, as if something might be missing here. Whenever I hear this track I long for something more, and even though the siren song makes a comeback here, I feel disappointed by the final product.

And was it familiar when you touched my sister
God, I don't think there's a word for that

Blue black, maybe you got something but the flowers grew back

I gave it away, whore for a day
It's so ugly, I'm still breathing
But you never got my virgin heart
It stayed locked up, it's still beating

Blue black, maybe you got something but the flowers grew back

Walking Higher

The story of the mentor, of she who gave vision and life to that we think is gone forever or is unreachable. We aspire to reach the plane where those we admire and look up to stand in our imaginations. We validate their existence in what they have meant to us and they never truly die as long as we continue to remember them.

And I will feel for you in the music.
And I will send that river home.
And I will cry for you sometimes
when the night is down.
And I will raise my head up to the mountains,
talk to the birds and I fly
'cause the spirit lives on,
when the body dies.

And could I be walking higher
Could I be right beside her?
Could I be walking higher
Could I be right beside her?

Light Years

Discovery and salvation. Never mind the problems with using "light years" as a measurement of time. If you've sat there in the dark listening to this album in from the beginning without interruption, this is a welcome moment of triumph. That triumph is tinged with desperation. Heather Nova later revealed her interest in film and in writing themes that would work in cinema, and here she gives the listener what they were hoping for if they hang on the romantic side. Our heroine may have found that island, but the hoarse cry in her voice at the end accentuates the fact that this oasis is all too temporary.

You found me drifting,
big motion like a bird,
strangest song I ever heard.

Now, now that you're here
stay with me light years,
light years, light years

You may even find yourself wishing you were the hero.

Verona

Sometimes the deepest love can never be fulfilled, because it can only exist as a dream in the mind's eye and in the heart. What it would become in reality would never measure up to the ideal that is created from both experience and hope.

It gets inside you like the sun,
it makes you wet just like the rain
It makes you sound so sentimental,
it's a lovely kind of pain.

Childhood dreams of the perfect life, of the perfect life partner and everything magically coming together hang like a memory that won't go away. The memory can hypnotize you, making you wonder where all the innocence went and wondering if you ever had a chance to realize those dreams. Everything changes and you have to put on new clothes to face the life that was taking a far more crooked path than you ever imagined possible in those childhood days. Yet, you go on, and sometimes memories are sufficient fuel. The dreams change as well, but the roots remain where they always were.

Yeah Romeo you are priceless, lifeless,
skipping star to scar to star
I used to dream you'd be slipping, slipping from me.
Burning, breathing, breathing, sleeping, in me.
I used to lean over the side of the boat
and get hypnotized by the water and dream.
Slipping, slipping, slipping,
slipping from me.
Burning, burning, breathing,
sleeping in me.

Doubled Up

The final track finds our heroine playing back on themes we have explored throughout the course of our story. We aren't going out with a whimper and we aren't going out with a bang. We are going out not with hope and not with desperation. The more things change the more they stay the same. We are quiet, resolved to face the human condition and our own demons. We push on without complaining and without blowing everything up in protest.

I saw a mountain from higher above
I held your hand and I was doubled up in love
Big sky above me, a river inside me
and I'm doubled up in love

You're watching your step but you fall as you're walking
You take it in stride but still you fall as you're walking
Big sky above me, a river inside me
and I'm doubled up in love

Feels good, it feels like poetry
don't ask me to explain it just feels good, like poetry
I'm doubled up again

Look at the sky
Lift off like an aeroplane,
watch the ground come up to meet you
Big sky above me, a river inside me
and I'm doubled up in love

Feels good, it feel like poetry,
don't ask me to explain it just feels good, like poetry,
I'm doubled up again.

The cycle goes around and the wheels continue to turn. We're all in the same boats. They just painted them different colors.


Lyrics and music by Heather Nova
Copyright 1995 Big Life Music America, Inc.
Ensign Music Corporation (BMI)