Bill Nadeau

Heaven Only Knows

“Heaven Only Knows” goes all the way back to the summer of 1979.

I was on my first national tour, playing “C” bars across the country. Almost every town had one of these places and, almost without exception, the locals called it “The Zoo.”

They were all pretty much the same, except each one reflected whatever was going on in the town around it.

In Grande Prairie, Alberta, that meant the oil boom.

The Park Hotel sat right in the middle of the madness. Everybody seemed to be from somewhere else. There was money, there were drugs, and underneath all of it there was this strange combination of displacement and loneliness. And the ratio of men to women was... not even close.

For me, though, life was pretty good. We were young, making money, playing every night and trying new things.

Including, as it happened, my first experience with cocaine. I was a late bloomer.

Some strangers I'd never seen before invited me into the washroom of another seedy bar and we did a line on... well, you don't need all the details.

What I remember is that the song appeared in my head almost immediately.

Not just an idea for a song. The song.

I could hear the melody, the feel of it, and especially the lines:

For the ones we left behind us
For a lady with a rose

For some reason, those words seemed to sum up the Alberta I was seeing around me better than anything else I had heard.

So I excused myself from my generous ne'er-do-wells and ran back to the hotel before I lost it.

I didn't even know the chords. They weren't particularly complicated, but they weren't the sort of changes I normally played. I sat down, figured out what I was hearing and proudly presented my brand-new song to the band.

Their verdict:

“Bill... that's country.”

It wasn't exactly our genre.

So the song went back into my head, where it stayed for more than 35 years.

I finally recorded “Heaven Only Knows” in 2015. I was pretty happy with it, and it became a regular part of my live shows, usually getting a fair-to-good response despite my decidedly homemade production.

This year I went back and produced it again for my Next! album.

And after all these years, it has found its way back into my live songlist.

A song that appeared out of nowhere one night in 1979 has somehow managed to hang around for nearly half a century.

And every time I play it, part of me is still back in Grande Prairie — in the middle of the oil boom, surrounded by people a long way from home.

Heaven only knows.