When We Were Young

Album: Sky Stacked Full (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about Atkinson's mother and Atkinsons' childhood growing up in Windsor, Ontario. Anna nearly left it off the album because she thought it was too direct and personal. When he mother passed away, she decided that she would include it, after all.

    "My father passed away 13 years ago but my mother passed away just two years ago," she said in a 2017 Songfacts interview. "That song, I wrote it sort of for her but while she was still alive and before she was ill. I don't even remember why I wrote it, exactly, but it was very direct about what it was about. She loved the song. She used to come to my shows, and she actually did a quilt – she was an artist and kind of renaissance woman. She did a whole bunch of different things and started learning the violin in her sixties. She was a very interesting, sometimes insufferable, but amazingly vibrant human being. She had a lot of struggles but did an amazing job in life as well."
  • For the video, Atkinson went back to the house she grew up in. The unicyclist in the video was Atkinson's friend George. He was meant to represent the street fairs and carnivals that used to go on in the neighborhood. The children in the video were neighborhood kids who showed up spontaneously and starting chasing the unicyclist without any direction.

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