The Canadian, for the uninitiated, is the train that travels twice weekly from Vancouver to Toronto. While it’s largely marketed as a “cross country” experience, its route also acts as an essential inter-community link for people who live north of the Trans-Canada highway.
I was boarding for one of these shorter trips (only an hour, freight trains notwithstanding) when my service manager let me know the good news: after much uncertainty, VIA Rail has re-started its Artist on Board program, which allows musicians in solo or duo acoustic formats to travel in exchange for musical performances on board (and at some acoustically beautiful train stations during longer rest stops).
Life is a train
I immediately reached out to singer, songwriter and musician Orit Shimoni who is more intimately familiar with the Artist on Board program than anyone else I know. She generously shared her thoughts – many of them even more fully expressed online in her essay Life is A Train.
“Unlike the majority of musicians who have a home-base somewhere and head out on tour, being on the road was a full-time existence for me for over a decade of my life,” she writes. “I had no home base. I was an ACTUAL hobo, (by choice) – nomadic, and transient in my way of living, and I was living that way entirely for the purposes of sharing my observations about life and this world through song.
… The first time I performed on The Canadian, (for which one needs strong legs and a strong voice), it hit me in monumental levels that I was singing a train song on a moving train. I teared up and as I talked about it with the group of passengers who had gathered, everyone else teared up too. We were living a musical tradition in the here and now.”
On one such trip, in 2020, she found herself in the Winnipeg train station for longer than usual: “I had sat at that very station at least 50 times during the station break on my way across Canada, but it was the first time I was getting off there for a whole week, to play my shows in town. It just happened to be the week that the entire world suddenly closed down and the lock-downs were declared. When they said “Shelter at home,” I was beside myself, because I didn’t have one. The train and the road had been my home. Taken in by strangers-turned-friends, distraught, shocked and scared, I went out to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the night, and I heard a freight train whistle. It brought me to my knees. I AM THAT TRAIN SONG, I thought to myself – the kind of train song where the singer is in prison and hears the train go by but can’t get on.”
Nearly five years later, VIA announced the program was coming back. Shimoni was in Holland on tour at the time. “You could have probably heard my whoops and hollers all the way to the moon. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a jolt of joy like that. I sat down immediately to record an impromptu album of train song covers! Next thing you know, I was Via Rail’s first performer back.”
Win-Win
Not only do the creative relationships between music and the railroad run deep, the news is much-needed good news for independent musicians looking to tour Canada in smaller formats or to create collaborations with their peers.
Jennarie, a Toronto-based pop artist who traveled with her friend and collaborator Hannah Barstow observes: “Traveling and touring as a musician can be expensive and inaccessible for most. VIA’s reinstatement of the Artists on Board program offers struggling musicians a chance to travel to Vancouver or Halifax for free while performing their original music for hundreds of travelers. While the grant system in Canada is fantastic, the touring division can be highly competitive. Having VIA as a travel option for performances across the country is a great opportunity, and I believe it will significantly benefit our community.”
Regular contributor and advisor to this column, and past Artist on Board, Liv Cazzola calls the news a win-win. “[It makes] touring to the far reaches of this wide land more feasible, and making the experience on board so much more exciting for passengers. It also helps facilitate Slow Touring goals (sustainability, accessibility and deep relationships between: our bodies, planet, and communities) Taking the train across Canada not only literally slows it down, it is also more ecologically viable, promotes these values to our fanbase, makes it more cost effective to connect with rural communities, and is far less taxing on our bodies than driving long distances.”
Slow Touring
Cazzola and her touring partner Braden Phelan are currently part of a Slow Touring pilot project through Ontario Presents, which is bringing together presenters, agents and artists who are interested in integrating this into their practice. “It’s particularly important in the face of the climate crisis, and as we confront the lack of infrastructural support for young families on the road. (i.e. childcare, time between activities etc),” Cazzola says.
It was precisely these reasons that Toronto-based singer and musician Maryem Tollar and her partner Ernie were drawn to the program for a trip from Montreal to Halifax on The Canadian’s east coast sister-route, The Ocean.
“Train travel is THE BEST” Tollar says. “I prefer it over flying any day because of the environmental factors, my fear of flying, meeting people, and I love sleeping on a train. It’s also an awesome way to see the landscapes of our country. Being the musicians on the train gave us even more ways to connect with other passengers – entertaining them on the train to help them pass the time, and entertaining ourselves because we, of course, love making music – as well as performing at the train station in Halifax on our way home. We brought our kids with us and as soon as we stepped on the train, our youngest asked if we could live on the train, and set about exploring all of the cars. And I thought the food was amazing.”
Our Bodies, Our Instruments.
My own experience as an Artist on Board echoes all this. My first trip was with my creative partner Terra Hazelton in 2014. A generously donated car waited for us just south of Edmonton, which was going to take us on a seven-week, entirely self-funded tour of Alberta and BC. Us and all of our musical instruments. Even if we could have afforded the airplane tickets (which we couldn’t), or the extra baggage fees (which we couldn’t), we were both worried about the physical and mental wear and tear of flying – as people and as singers, and our capacity to physically complete the tour.
And if we were worried about the instruments that, as singers, we carried in our bodies, we were even more so about the ones we were putting in cases, given the general track record of airlines in terms of handling instruments with care. When you are self-funding the tour, you can’t afford to lose an instrument. VIA acknowledges that if you are playing music on the train, then your instruments are your tools, not your baggage. The instruments in cases remained in our possession the entire time, and (with a bit of creativity) safely stowed in our cabin, and our “bodily instruments” got to sleep lying down, eat good food, get off social media and just engage with the people and places we were encountering – which is why we had booked a tour in the first place.
Musical “Families”
Along with meeting passengers, VIA, and their service crew was my first introduction to the extended family that is the “railroad community”. It was striking to me on that first trip, that our crew not only respected our instruments, but treated them with the same kind of care that they would treat a living passenger - or, perhaps, the way a musician would take care of their own? Talking to the crew, I discovered that a lot of them are musicians themselves. Now that I live in a community where the majority of people work for CN or VIA I have realized it is more than a theory: there are an awful lot of musicians working on and alongside the trains, in all kinds of capacities!
I asked a couple of community Facebook groups for reasons that this might be, and the responses all seemed to agree that it was true – and the range of theories as to why was fascinating. Some very practical – long periods of work followed by long periods of rest; living in smaller more isolated places; the kinds of close-knit community that form; and the better probability, when you live on a rail line, that a musician would come through town to play live.
Some theories were downright poetic. Marjorie Miconi’s father was an engineer and she “learned to walk on trains.” She mused that “the rhythm of the rails is in our blood, bound to bring out our hidden talent.” Despite the often rough-and-tumble mythology of the railroad and the solitary characters riding it, it seems that trains, like music, very often run in families.
Last word goes to Orit. I haven’t seen her in close to a decade and it was only through writing this column that I found out that she’s the scheduled Artist on Board for my next train ride, in a couple of weeks. I’m going all the way to the end of the line this time, so I'm looking forward to time connecting with her and her music, face-to-face.
As she says, “there is no better way to connect stories, songs, and human beings, than when they are all sharing a literal journey together, and especially through the medium of song. The train ride is just that, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a metaphor for everything else.”
Sophia Perlman grew up bouncing around the jazz, opera, theatre and community arts scene in Toronto, joined the creative exodus to Hamilton in 2014, and is now centered in Hornepayne, Ontario, where she eagerly awaits the arrival of her regular WholeNote in order to armchair-travel and inform her Internet video consumption.
