The 47th Annual Schmolaris Prize is awarded to...

Le temps est encore au soleil couchant

Les mots se perdent pendant que tu dérives

La rivière si long

Ou vous êtes

As we all speed toward oblivion, let us not be so alarmed; let us, instead, be cradled in the soft yet metallic hands of artificial intelligence and computation; let us let it catch us, caress us, and let us down gently. Let these new giants of civilization carry on where we left off, and let our humanity be remembered for the good it has accomplished, for the wonders it’s created, and for the love it once offered.

For the 47th annual Schmolaris Prize, I tasked my AI helpers to find that good, that wonder, that love in music. They scoured Manitoba’s musical archives for data; they compared the current nominees to previous winners, to runners-up, to the beautiful losers; they analyzed melodic patterns, rhythms, and lyrical structures. All to find that perfect album to represent this year’s Schmolaris Prize.

And, by assessing the strengths of their algorithmic accuracy (of which I can attest was very high; by combining all four models, they’ve achieved an r-squared value of 0.94), they seem to have done just that.  

Of course, I, Steve Schmolaris, retain the right to overturn any such selection, but their choice (if choice is the right word) is one that aligned very well with my own. And so, it is with great pride that I announce that the 47th annual Schmolaris Prize is awarded to Sam Singer for his album Where the Rivers Do.

It’s an album that, like a river, carves itself into one’s earthly grounding; it scours one’s shores, cuts into the rocks of one’s being; slowly, at first, but then, with each repeat, the valleys it creates sink deeper and deeper. (You’ll see what I mean.) And it begins the way most great works do: with a deal with God.  

Or should I say with the Sun; with whatever one’s life revolves around. (The Sun motif – with its cycles, its repetition, its predictability –  is one we’ll keep coming back to, so best to bring it up now. It builds from a previously released song, Sunny, from which those opening lines in French were taken: in English, it says:“ The time is still at sunset. Words are lost as you drift. The river is long. Where are you?” These lines –  referencing the Sun, drifting down a river on its uncontrollable currents, and a search for someone – are expanded upon, put under a microscope, its details picked apart, on Where the Rivers Do; and it connects Sam Singer’s past, in Sunny, with his present album.  

This is not the only song on Where the Rivers Do that Sam links to his previous work: Traitor Birds follows his album Don’t Mistake Me for a Lovebird. Walking – or flying – away from a lover can easily be seen as a traitorous act. [And within Traitor Birds, there are additional references to other albums; for example, take the line “They pour into the empty streets, down the dirty road, I’ll take the lonely tracks.” This motif of “the road” will be one we’ll come back to in a different context, but for now I want to make its connection to Sam’s album From the hills, beaten roads, down to the trees.

This connection to the past – to what has already occurred – is important (as we’ll see by the album’s end); and so when Sam references these other songs and albums, he is emphasizing that one’s thoughts and deeds and loves and lovers do not happen in isolation; it is all part of a continuous journey where every effect has its cause.

And it’s this – cause and effect – that becomes central to understanding Where the Rivers Do. And that’s what we’ll focus on now.  

But back to the Sun, to the deal with God, that uncaused cause, that first beautiful mover.)

What was the deal? Freedom. (This, too, links to a previous song of Singer’s: the aptly named – for our purposes –  Freedom.) It’s the ability to freely choose one’s course in life, whatever that may be. God, we were told, allows for freewill to exist. And it is up to us – our choices – on how to live. And so when Singer sings “I thought we had a deal,” it is with the understanding that a promise has been broken; it is the sudden understanding that freewill is an illusion, and that one’s fate – whatever that may be, it’s impossible to know – is predestined, predetermined, preordained.  

Throughout Where the Rivers Do, the Sun – or the stars – refer to this lost ideal, this lost sense of freedom and freewill, this idyllic dreamland where the sun always shines. On Traitor Birds, he sings “Sometimes I lose myself in the setting sun.” This sense of losing oneself in the darkness of a setting sun contains a sadness, a forlornness, that freewill is an illusion, and so Sam – understandably – is wistful for the days when he didn’t know of the rigidness of determinism – the causes and effects – that guides his every action. But Traitor Birds doesn’t dwell on this sadness for long; instead, it is a song of hope, a song of renewal and newness; it is a song of spring. This is why he sings “I find a piece of me in the month of June.” In this context, Sam Singer is reborn. He’s dusting off the initial disappointment, he’s cleaning himself up, he’s cutting his fingernails in preparation for a new day; a day full of new possibilities. Just because “the deal” was a false one doesn’t mean things won’t work out well for him. A good life – one full of love and kindness and every joy there is to know – is still possible. Determinism doesn’t necessarily mean a life of destitution.

And so Sam drifts – is pulled – further down the river, around another bend, another gully. He lets the currents do what they do.

But hope and reality are two different things, and so on Golden Days, Sam still wishes he could be free, even for just a day. The song is a wish to feel the freedom that Eve may have had in the morning of the early days of Creation; that he could see himself beside her, naked and free, content in the ability to change himself, however he wished, wherever he wished, sometime along the way. However, he knows that that’s “all over now”, that “it’s all by the book”, meaning that, much like a novel, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end; and that a story can’t deviate from what’s written on the page. Fate becomes like “a field of glass”; hard and painful, and “all so bleak”. Sam continues to read from the book that’s been written for him, and he begins to feel like he’s just watching himself. He becomes “ready to die... on some gravel path”, and then sees himself in the distance, “slowing to a stand.” Pray all you want, he’s saying, put your hands up to the sky, try to make a deal with God – nothing will work. In the end, we all slow to a stand. And die.

Awash with despair, Sam continues down the river, and sees two trees that have entwined themselves together. He remarks that these “Two trees have become one.” Two distinct fates have wrapped themselves around one another, so much so that they are now indistinguishable; they share the same single fate. It’s a new perspective that Sam, in his preoccupation with freewill and determinism, hadn’t considered. Before he saw these trees, determinism had seemed like a “lonely track”, one that had to be walked all by oneself. But these trees have provided the evidence that there is a different way. The journey need not be a lonely one. And, if the fates are kind to him, his own fate can be similarly wrapped around another’s. These are the “new clothes” in which Sam dresses: that, although determinism is true, there can still exist happiness; the fate that he’s bound to could still be a fate that allows for love.

The floodgates of possibility are suddenly flung wide open; out they pour into the empty streets – and it’s something he thought could only occur if freewill existed. Now, the endless river, that once seemed so lonely, seems like an adventure. The “old song” – the idea that only freedom allowed for true happiness – is forgotten. The symbology of the two trees suggests that this “old song” is the wrong outlook to take. To be determined – to lack freewill – is not something to despair; it is something that can be celebrated. These new thoughts allow for Sam Singer to see the world in a new light: spring, with its new blossoms and flowers, has sprung.

Born in June continues with this idea of newness. It’s the same with any reference to the morning. Spring is the start of a new year; the morning is the start of a new day. The road – the gravel path, the lonely track, the river – that he once saw with a sense of sadness is now “the golden road”; it has become imbued, if not with freedom, with something very similar. Something like the moon, for the moon does not shine, but merely reflects the light of the Sun.  

With this new frame of mind, Sam Singer recognizes that if one loves someone then there is nothing one can do to try to counter it. You must consign yourself to the fact of that love; for, if we have no freewill, how could you not love that person? You could not do otherwise – the choice was never actually a choice. If Singer was forced to live a thousand lives – and this is something I’ll come back to later – if Singer was forced to repeat one thousand Junes, over and over, in a cyclical fashion not unlike the Sun (in the sense that the Earth revolves around it), it would always turn out the same. And so isn’t a deterministic kind of love the truest kind of love? In every life, in every repeat of the universe, in every rewinding to the beginning, to Creation, in every return to springtime, one’s actions – one’s love – would be the same.

And, yet, Sam can’t quite leave behind the notion – the desire – for a kind of freedom; and he sings “Know that somewhere, I am free.” Not that he knows where that place is; it remains an intangible ideal, but somewhere down the river on which he drifts, he may find it. Or so he hopes.

By this time on the album – by Mirror in the Sunrise– Sam Singer has accepted determinism. At times, it still “leaves him stoned”, but those days, those mornings, are becoming fewer and fewer. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the people around him have also accepted that their fates are set. Rachele, for one, still believes in freewill, and seemingly sets out to prove it to Sam by getting on a plane, and leaving him “miles below”; a decision she claims to be all her own. Her absence affects him dearly, and it causes the nights to seem much longer than they otherwise should feel.  

Whether Rachele intends to come back or not is left unsaid, but her obstinance hasn’t convinced Sam to abandon his newfound determinism. “I just wanna make you see,” he sings, meaning that he wants Rachele to understand that freewill, as she understands it, is impossible to attain. A part of determinism is selfishness, he tells her, and that even when he says “I love you,” there is a selfishness, a centering on oneself, present. He says to Rachele, “When I think of you, I just think about myself”. Love for another is inextricably linked to a selfish need to satisfy oneself. It is like looking in a mirror; although he wishes that he could truly see Rachele – in the way that Rachele thinks she can see through the mirror and see Sam – he can’t.  

It is at this point that the river has split – Rachele goes left, while Sam goes right – but perhaps there’s still hope that their paths – their lonely tracks, their gravel roads – will meet again. Perhaps someday they can both watch the sunrise, both experiencing the elation of determinism as seen through the eyes of morning, the eyes of Spring, the eyes of June; perhaps he can convince her yet.

In Eve of the Morning, Sam begins to equate freedom with Rachele (and if not Rachele exactly, then what she represents: love and the simulacrum of freedom. If true freedom is impossible, then a deterministic kind of love becomes the next best thing, and so Sam sings, “Wherever you come from, by the tracks I’m gonna follow.” (Again, tracks, roads, highways, paths, streets, rivers – they all refer to the same thing: being confined to the causes and effects that control us.)  In Rachele, there is the allure of this new kind of freedom; and so it mixes freewill (of a sort) with determinism; a blending of the Sun and the Moon, of light and darkness; a twisting together of evenings and mornings.

And, for a second, these thoughts make Sam feel like he is truly free, that he’s forgotten that freewill is an illusion. But only for a second. He walks across Osborne bridge and toward the fountain by the legislative building, and his thoughts turn toward the past. If he could go back in time and repeat everything, would he have done it any different? Of course not, but “love makes [him] dream of the lives [he’s] not lived yet.” Has he already gone back to replay his life? How many times has he done that? How many times has he walked this very path? Thought these very thoughts by the fountain? One thousand times? More? How many rivers has he drifted down, over and over, around the same bend, past the same rocky outcrops, seeing the same two trees twined together as one?

But, thinks Sam on So, It Is, if that’s how it has to be, so be it. He’ll continue down the river, once again, continue to chase that sense of freedom that love or Rachele represents – that ideal – knowing that this pursuit is predetermined and that he had no choice in the matter, knowing that he may well have been chasing it over and over and over for eternity upon eternity. In this sense, the line “And so they did, And so it is, And there they are,” becomes a mantra of simply noticing and accepting what is happening or has happened; for what else can one do?

On Midnight Horse, Sam, once again, dwells on death. When the road ends, when the river dries up, when the ride grinds to a halt – what then? If he’s just a collection of atoms crashing into other atoms, where does he go when his life is all said and done? Perhaps that’s where his pursuit will be successful, he thinks optimistically, perhaps that’s where “the deal” still stands, and a truly free choice can be made; and, if so, what choice would he have to make, what would the question be? Sam knows, if he’s provided the option, what question he’d ask: Can I, on my winged horse, have one more ride around the Sun? And if he had to travel down those tracks, over the hills, the beaten road, down to trees, where the river lies, to do it all over again, he’d do it. Again and again, he’d do it. Even if freewill is an illusion, he’d do it. Just one more ride around the Sun.

This sense of continuation, of another cycle around the Sun, of another morning, of another June, of another life, is expanded upon on It Is The Next Time. “I came back to get on again,” Sam sings. His fate, he sees, is as fixed as the stars: his fate is to forever seek freedom, to step out of the fog of yesterday (that previous life, the old life, with its fading, soon to be forgotten, memories).

By the end of the song (and album), Sam Singer finds himself back where he started, at the source of the river, the beginning of time, at Creation, making that supposed deal with God, with the Sun, with freedom. But then the winds blow him downstream, and Sam, existing in a hall of memories, once again drifts down the river, is pulled by its uncontrollable currents, to wherever it leads. To Rachele. To another.  

If the fates are kind, thinks Sam, then they’ll meet again. The fates cannot do otherwise; it has happened before, and so it must happen again. Cause and effect. Somewhere beyond the bend, somewhere around the corner, somewhere down the beaten road. Remember those two trees that became one? It will be just like those trees; their rivers will merge; and they’ll meet again wherever their rivers do.

Congratulations Sam Singer,

Steve Schmolaris

September 17th, 2024