More than 30 years after the runaway success of his song Life Is a Highway, Tom Cochrane is still full of energy.
The 70-year-old legendary Canadian musician will be playing in Vernon Monday, Nov. 13, at the Performing Arts Centre.
But he made an earlier appearance in town, caught by local businessman Sherman Dahl.
Thanks to a tee time set up by long-time friends Dev Randhawa and Jamie Bannerman, the Emily Dahl Foundation’s Dahl was surprised to be playing golf with Cochrane on the last day of the season at Predator Ridge Oct. 21.
The course was completely empty. When Dahl pulled into the valet area a Predator employee told him, “You are the only group playing today.”
Then Randhawa introduced him to Cochrane and off they went.
After golf they went for wings and beer, and it was Bannerman who asked Cochrane to explain the story of his hit, Life Is a Highway.
First envisioned as Love Is a Highway, Cochrane told them his original version was nixed while he was still in the rock band Red Rider.
It was his friend John Webster, an instrumentalist on Cochrane’s second studio album, Mad Mad World, who encouraged him to revisit a demo recording with mumbled vocals and improvised lyrics that still lacked that infectious singalong chorus. The song was bare bones at best and Cochrane didn’t know what to do with it.
He told them the story about returning from a “shocking and traumatic” visit to West Africa where he found the answer.
Struck by his experience overseas with the World Vision famine relief organization, Cochrane was trying to process his thoughts after witnessing levels of poverty and pain unlike anything he had seen before.
“I didn’t realize how much that would affect me,” he told the group.
Cochrane needed a happy song he could “hang the experience on” and one morning, inspiration struck for a new take on Life Is a Highway.
Cochrane said, “It became a positive talk to myself … saying you can’t really control all of this stuff, you just do the best you can.”
Writing some ideas out, he rushed into his backyard recording studio to lay it all down.
Within days of its release, Life Is a Highway was all over Canadian airwaves.
Stateside, it didn’t take long to catch fire, climbing to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“It just seemed to keep going,” Cochrane recalled.
Dahl says the kindness and compassion of Cochrane was “amazing, and I most certainly look forward to spending more time with him in the future.”
Dahl presents the following verse from Life Is a Highway that he thinks is a powerful teaching:
There’s a world outside every darkened door
Where blues won’t haunt you anymore
Where the brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore
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