By Request… “Kept on Dancing”

Yeah man, so anyway, here’s what I’d like to do.
Every week or so, I’ll take requests to record a song of mine.
Just me and my guitar.
I’ll give the back story of how, when, why and where I wrote the song.
Who knows?
It might be fun.

I’ll go first.

“Kept on Dancing”

This wasn’t the first song that I wrote.
It wasn’t even the first song that I wrote that ended up on my first album.
But it was the first song that I wrote, where I thought, “Maybe I can do this…”

I wrote the bulk of this song in Edmonton, back in April of 1992.
In fact, in the early afternoon of April 23rd, in St Albert, to be exact.
I was 23 years old.
My mother was in the hospital.
Cancer.

Later that afternoon, my brother and I went to the Cross Cancer Clinic to visit with her.
Some of her friends, that she taught with, were visiting as well.
Leah, Sylvie and Val.
It was a full house.
Surprisingly, given the heft of the moment, lots of laughs.
I was walking down the hallway, when I crossed paths with her doctor.

“Mike, can I talk to you for second?”
“Yeah man, what’s up?”

He told me that there was nothing they could do for my Mom anymore.
The cancer was too widespread.
He said that anymore treatment would just cause undue pain and stress to what time she had left.

“It’s just a matter of time.”
“How much time?”
“Three, maybe six months…”

She died the next morning.

In late August of 92, I was flipping through my lyric book when I came across this song that I’d started back in April.
The verses were pretty much done, but I needed to flesh out the chorus.
I knew that every line in the song was pointing to something.
But, I just didn’t know what.
When I wrote the line, “The music died but I kept on dancing…”
I knew.

In February of 1993, I moved to Dallas, Texas to record my first album, “Songs From A Northern Town”.
Late one night in early April, I recorded “Kept on Dancing” in one take.
As the last notes rang out, my producer (Philip Barrett) said, “Mike, performances like that, are the reason I got into the recording business…”
I’ve played this song, probably, a thousand times, and every time, as the last chord rings out, I can hear Philip’s voice…
“Performances like that, are the reason I got into the recording business…”

The guitar I wrote the song on, is over my left shoulder the video.
The guitar I’m playing is the one I used to record the song in Dallas back in April of ’93.

Mike Plume
February 20, 2019