Toronto-based indie folk band Great Lake Swimmers share soothing live footage of “For You To Come Around” from Odd Fellows Hall in St. Catharines, Ontario. The track comes off their just released ninth studio album Caught Light.
Frontman and founder Tony Dekker shares, “‘For You To Come Around’ is about being stuck at the station, in a state between being and becoming. It’s about the baggage we carry and the emotional lifting it requires for us to endure, and ultimately, it is about loneliness and longing, and the inability to truly know someone. It might be ‘Waiting For Godot,’ if that were a 1970s country-folk inspired story song.”
Led Dekker, holed up in the Canadian Ganaraska Forest, between Peterborough and Port Hope, with producer Darcy Yates (Bahamas) and engineer Jimmy Bowskill (Blue Rodeo), Great Lake Swimmers crafted their most realized work to date, tracked in just three days. Pulling from early ’70s folk/pop/rock like Gordon Lightfoot or Dory Previn, and ahead of recording, Dekker declared John Martyn’s 1971 album Bless the Weather required listening. Dekker adds the making of this record has given him, “a newly found zeal for not being precious and being more direct.”
On the meaning behind the title and themes throughout, Dekker says, “Where I grew up in a rural part of Niagara Region, on a farm, in the back 40 there was a very small airstrip with a skydiving club. As kids, we’d see these guys jumping out of planes, five, six at a time. Once, one of them landed in the fields around our house. That was such a powerful image to me as a kid: What happens when you don’t land where you intended, when life blows you off course? The phrase “caught light” refers to an unexpected situation where you don’t have as much as you thought you wanted or needed. Early on in the album process, it became apparent that would be the title track.”
