A Thin Place

A thin place is often described as a place where the veil of the earthly world and spiritual world is thin and instead of being seen and felt it transcends all the senses of the person with whom it comes in contact. They are places where some people have said to have experienced a divine presence, while others have come away from these experiences frightened and troubled.

Crooked Creek ,Caledonia Mountain, NB

I came up with the idea of this song while driving to Caledonia Mountain with my best friend Shannon to his cabin. He told me about a man he knew who described a certain place on the mountain as a "thin place". Naturally, I was intrigued since I had never heard of this before.

It gave me the idea to write a song about a man who experiences contact with the spiritual realm in what he perceives to be a hallowed area in a clearing on a mountain. Of course, considering the nature of the songs I was writing for this record, there was bound to be a tragic or sinister element to the song.

What I find fascinating is how songs come to you. The subject of thin places came up naturally in conversation and ignited the idea for a song. Was the idea so compelling that I had to write about it? Was it simply the fact that I was looking for ideas that fit in with the dark theme I was already pursuing? Regardless, this is the song that came of that conversation on a Winter afternoon driving to a cabin on Caledonia Mountain.

A Thin Place

There's a thin place he goes from time to time,

To be with those who’ve passed on,

That still place between dusk and darkness,

To Caledonia to speak to those who've gone

The first time they spoke was on that lonely mountain,

It shook him down to the bone,

Those consoling voices have grown strange,

Now he shivers with the memories all alone

Chorus:

The thin place he goes between the dark and the dawn,

Where once sacred words became this profane verse

The secrets of the dead are his alone to bear,

An angel's loving grace or a devil's wretched curse

They swirl and descend upon him

Silken and lithe in their flight

Sounds that once soothed became wicked

Spur him to a dizzying height

Higher and higher he ascends

To the tops of the towering pines

Voices draw him over the mountainside

To a death both infernal and sublime