Written in angst during the 2016 Fort Mac Murray wild fire for my late brother, Ian, who survived the fire but was stuck in the lineup of trucks fleeing the fire to Edmonton when I wrote it. I couldn't reach him and it was really scary. Scary because I could not reach him, and also scary because Ian was a pyromaniac, and he would often mutter that he would burn that place to the ground one day, so I was actually concerned that he had caused the fire. He said the town was possessed by an evil entity, and that he lost too many friends to the poor working conditions. It feels sometimes like the wildfire season is part of Ian's spirit, just due to the timing of things and my memories of him. As soon as I heard “Fort Mac on Fire” I immediately felt afraid for my brother, and the more I tried to reach him and could not, the more I was triggered back to our childhood, reliving times when I was constantly helping him escape from or extinguish fires he had set, or watching him flea from a fire he had set yelling “don’t tell dad!” on the way by. I think it was how he got a sense of control over his life back then. To his credit, it was way out of control and none of that was his fault. I remember when our parents moved us to a scary old farm that looked haunted and was full of huge spiders. Way bigger than what you might see today anywhere near Toronto. We explored the basement and found it was dripping with the huge spiders, so without skipping a beat, Ian grabbed my aerosol hairspray and lighter, and he made a make-shift blow-torch with it and eradicated the spiders. We are so lucky that old house did not go up in flames right then and there. As we grew up into teenagers and started having raves and punk shows in our barn, Ian always liked to set a bonfire in our fire pit, and he would light it the same way, with the hairspray blow torch onto a pile of skids and newspapers. Those are some of my favourite memories of him. Sometimes, to my horror, he would light the hairspray blow torch and point it in my direction but barely miss and he’d say “psych” and laugh as if it was funny but nah. When I think back to some of the fires he set as a kid, I’m amazed that he lived through some of them. Once he emptied a huge box of fireworks onto my parents floor, just the gun powder in a pile on the floor. Then he lit it on fire just to see what it would look like. The whole house filled with smoke. There was a huge burn on my parent’s parquet floor. So what did Ian do? He moved my parent’s dresser to the middle of the room to hide the burn mark as if no one would notice a dresser in the middle of the room for no reason. Another time, he set the forest beside our house on fire. It was fall and the leaves were crispy and deep. He kicked a circle about as big as a gas station with his feet, it must have taken him a while. I was walking my dog in the forest and I saw Ian crouched down setting the fire. I saw it grow a little bigger than he could handle. I yelled to him. He asked me to help him put it out. I was doubtful that we could, and the circle was beginning to close in and he was intent on putting out the fire. I had to pull him and plea with him to run away from it. It was just about to close in on us when he agreed to run and we ran home. He begged me not to tell our dad. After the punishment he received for the gun powder, there was no way I would ever tell our dad. Another time I was again walking our dog past our neighbours abandoned barn they hadn’t used in over half a century and my dog really wanted to go in there so I did, and Ian was in there, blow torching spiders when he told me to leave because he wanted to light the whole barn. I convinced him to leave with me and not burn down the barn, but later on my way home from walking our dog the barn was a blaze. In 2015, during the first Fort Mac blaze when I couldn’t reach him I feared the worst. I thought he must have set it and got stuck in there and that’s it. At that moment, I got wasted and cried out a messy song on a dirty little Gretch. That song was Prairie Sun. It brought a spirit of relief to the moment, but I find guitars hard on my fingertips, so going with EDM. Thankfully, after a few long hours, he called and caught me up on his experience. Also thankfully, he appeared innocent, and was able to drive safely through the escape road (which if you have seen the footage, it looked like Armageddon and everyone barely escaped) and he called me when he got to Edmonton. That was in May of 2016. Ian and I actually had a falling out over a small inheritance. Our father left me Ian’s share due to his drug addiction, and worries he would get carried away with a lump sum of money and die from excessive partying, so I bought land with his share. It was a small forest. He asked me to give it to him, and I refused, but I offered him use it as long as he wanted. I was always realistically afraid that he would burn it down but I think he had more fun fishing and building forts and such in there. Ian was sadly taken from us by fentanyl in the Fall of 2022, just before the 2023 wild fire season ripped through Canada last year. A few months after Ian passed, I was scrolling through my phone, I still have the same old Iphone from 2016, and found the old recording from that day when I wrote the song for Ian. Just then, my fire alarm went off and would not stop until I removed the battery. In fact, every fire alarm in the building was sounding. It was due to the wild fire season that had just started and the smoke was coming in from outside. It was the worst wild fire season Canada had ever seen and it just felt like Ian was saying hello. I listened to the song a few times, remembering him calling to tell me he was okay, and decided to make the song into an EDM song to commemorate him. He loved to rave, and some of my best memories of him are from those parties so it just felt right. I like to think he is here with me sometimes. I remember thinking back to our falling out over the money and I asked him out loud as if he was there, “are you still mad at me? Give me a sign. Can you forgive me?”. A short while later the wild fire spread from the East coast right down to Northern Ontario and was headed straight for our forest. I thought for sure this was the sign and he was still pissed at me. I waited for it to reach my land and burn it down but it just skimmed past, leaving our trees unharmed as if to say “psych” like old times and I think that was the sign I asked him for. It's now the start of yet another “worst wildfire season ever”, Fort Mac Murray is ablaze for a second time, coincidentally just after I released this song to my sound cloud. It just feels like Ian wants to rave with us here and now. The song includes many metaphors from our warzone like upbringing. I wrote it in a panic, seeing the deadly connections between our childhood traumas and our outer grown-up manifestations, as each of our escapes from those days lead us to equally terrifying realities when I wrote it. I tried to make it a visual song, thinking of flying above the prairies, over Fort Mac, where the fire was, as it spread across fields what that might look like from far above. Perhaps with a need to extinguish the flames, I imagined the prairie in black and white might look more like an ocean from up there, the flower petals burning in the distance from overhead might combine like pixels on a tv screen, displaying glints of the sun reflecting off of ocean waves, and clouds in the sky formed shadows on the ground, resembling whales swiftly escaping from something enormous. This was a metaphor for the way our family ended. We all just ran away from the chaos in different directions. Sad but true. The second verse has a few layers to it but there is reference to the tar sands burning, plus, Ian struggled with opiates and that is a double entente. The midnight oils is referring both the slave working conditions in the tar sands and I used it as a metaphor opiates and opiate addiction. I felt like the drugs and the fires were both Ian’s coping strategies for his childhood traumas and adult surroundings and I feel they were connected like oil pipelines to our past. Ian and I used to feed buffalo at a petting zoo every summer as kids. It was one of our favourite things to do before he got attacked by ground hornets and we never went back. He also really enjoyed the movie “Where the Buffalo Roam” as the original to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I paid homage to in that verse as well. Rest in peace, Ian