Introducing "The Grey Line"

A New Song About the Long-Lost Greyhound Bus Lines across Canada

On October 4 I’m releasing a new song called “The Grey Line” about the Greyhound bus lines that were shut down across Canada in recent years.

Greyhound started operations in Canada in the 1920’s and soon became one of our country’s only affordable and national means of moving reliably (relatively speaking) from city to city. For a kid in his teens and early twenties without a car and with not much cash to hand, the Greyhound was my primary means of fledgling independence, whether I was off to the Okanagan to see a friend who had moved away, heading up North to go tree planting for the first time, or traveling East in search of young love. In 2018 Greyhound announced that it was shutting down most of its routs in Western Canada (including almost all the lines familiar to me), and then mid-pandemic in 2021, apart from a few cross-boarder routes, they suspended operations in Canada completely.  

A few months back, it occurred to me that these lost Canadian bus lines from the formative years of my youth were ripe for a song. I couldn’t find a way forward with the idea until the morning after Amy and I went to the third annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash at the Sanctuary in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. It was one of the most inspiring nights of music in recent memory. There was something about hearing renditions of old Dylan songs played with such feeling by people other than Dylan himself that brought out in a new way what I appreciate so much about his song writing. Dylan’s music captures such a complete union of the universal and particular. In each case, it is so clear that this is a Bob Dylan song—it’s completely particular. But then that particularity has a way of reaching out and touching everything. I thought while I was sitting there at the concert that my Greyhound song idea might be a way into a distinctly Canadian version of something like that.

The next morning at the breakfast table with the baby still in his highchair, the song more or less wrote itself, and that night I recorded the first demo. While the song doesn’t come out for a few weeks, here is chance to listen to that demo, which is still one of my favourite captures of the song:

But why such a loving ode to what was in the end just another failed corporate enterprise? The song is called “The Grey Line”, and this refers, of course, to the bus routes of the Greyhound Canada, but it is also an ode to all of those liminal, neither-here-nor-there moments that are so central to what it means to be human. There is something about occupying that space between point A and point B that is absolutely necessary to the soul and its operations. There is a work accomplished in that in the in between time even though it is mostly passed with my bum in a seat looking out a window. In fact, that image of motionless motion, of resting while hurtling forward, is really kind of profound in itself as a snapshot of what it is more or less always like for a human. We are always growing and changing and yet somehow always remaining who and what we are.

So the “Grey Line” of the song’s title is an love letter to those particular Greyhound bus lines that were a persistent presence in my early twenties as I explored, and made mistakes, and tried out new things, but it is also a love letter to the kid on the bus himself who hadn’t a clue what all this wandering about would amount to but was obedient to the need for that time of active waiting nonetheless.

---

“The Grey Line” will be available on streaming platforms on October 4, 2024. Please consider pre-saving the song on your streaming platform of choice.