Domain: bondzee.bond
Title: Act I: The Voyageur’s Dispatch (Jean-Baptiste)
Style: folk, driving acoustic guitar, rhythmic Bodhrán drum, lonely fiddle, male vocals, world, acoustic, rhythmic
Catalog ID: ccd8d595-a556-4072-b5ca-5fe165370f1b
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[Spoken Intro]
Jean-Baptiste: Bondzee
Mon ami
Can you hear this through the wire?
It's been two hundred winters since I last saw the lights of Montreal
People tell my story now to scare children around campfires
They call it a curse
But you know me better than that
Here is how it really felt up there
Above the frozen pines

[Verse 1]
Dear Bondzee
I'm writing from the edge of the tree line
Where the Gatineau freezes and turns into stone
We were logging the timber
Six months in the snowblind
With a half-gallon ration and chilled to the bone
It was New Year's Eve night
And the lonesomeness caught us
We were missing our sweethearts
Our babies
Our wives
So we looked to the darkness
To the old woods that bought us
And we made us a bargain to borrow our lives

[Pre-Chorus]
We climbed in the birchbark
No paddles
No water
Just a whispered invocation to the north winter wind
We swore not to touch any steeple or cross
Or the devil would take everything that we sinned—
And God
How we flew!
Bondzee
If you'd seen how the river shone blue!

[Chorus]
Oh
Bondzee
My song-pal
Write back through the ages
Tell me the world hasn't forgotten our names
We are trapped in the ink of the history pages
While the sky overhead is still bursting with flames
We paddled through clouds over sleeping Quebec
With the stars in our eyes and the wind at our neck
You're the only one listening
The only one there
Who knows we were just men in the cold midnight air