There is a Star
HOME PAGE • Call It Home - Introduction • 1 There is a Star • 2 Call It Home • 3 Your Day is Done • 4 Albert J Savoie • 5 Hand Troller •
6 Shingle Spit • 7 Glow of Summer • 8 Crackling Static • 9 Where I Belong • 10 Petrichor • 11 Standard 8 • 12 Ebb & Flow
Written in 1988, this song is a love letter to Hornby Island. I was living in Vancouver, and would try to break away some time to be on the island. Hornby had an almost magical pull to it. This pull and feeling of it being magical is something I’ve come to realize that many visitors to the island also feel. It’s a “happy place,” and many, like me, attach almost a spiritual value to it. It’s very personal, and it wasn’t until moving to the island full time that I saw how I was not alone in my sense of the place.
Over time I’ve come to see the island a little differently than I did when I only visited for a few weeks at a time. It’s a richer relationship now, and though some of the “magic” still exists, I see so many more facets to the island and life here (good and bad). I guess I’d describe the difference to how one feels when first in love versus later, once a relationship grows and develops. Some of the charm is gone, but there is more depth.
The song is really about spending a day from dawn to dusk. It was inspired by seeing the moon on the Western horizon on summer nights, with Venus shining brightly (so, it’s not really “a star”) as the sky gently darkens. I wrote it not long after listening to the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde while lying on the beach on an August night, peering up at the sky.
There is a Star
There is a star on the eastern horizon
It slowly fades from view
The golden sky from the summer sunrise
Changes to a soft shade of blue
The air is alive with the sound of the breezes
That whisper and sing their sweet tune
It’s the start of a day on this island paradise
And I’m spending it with you
Oooooh .. I hear a voice calling
I see my spirit falling through time and space endlessly
Oooooh .. I feel my soul revealing
Taste that hidden feeling, oh Hornby you’ve got your hold again on me
I walk out on this bar where the tide is ebbing fast
The water, a steel grey blue
Cast off some thoughts to be taken away from me
They return as good as new
I’ve stood on this shore a thousand years ago
I’ll be here when my body is through
In an endless dance, a timeless melody
And we’re both a part of this tune
( CHORUS )
There is a star on the western horizon
It shines near the light of the moon
The golden sky from the summer sunset
Fades to the call of a loon
The air is alive with the sound of the breezes
That whisper and sing their sweet tune
It’s the start of a day on this island paradise
And I’m spending it with you
