At the open stage they returned two young women, twin comets in mismatched orbits. Both new to the ritual, both possessed of voices that didn’t merely sing but insisted upon being heard. One glittered with defiance and pride, the other trembled with a dangerous fragility that makes a room go silent, the kind of voice that threatens to crack the glass of the world. She sang a dirge, the air tensed, waiting to see whether she or we would break first.

Near the end of the night, I approached them. “I’ve a studio upstairs,” I said. “Would you sing on something I’m building?” Youth, being incapable of suspicion, answered instantly: Yes! Now? And like bandits after a successful heist, we fled up the stairs. I played them the tune a small, haunted thing about a long ago night, after I’d performed with blue rodeo at the Holiday Tavern, that corner of Queen and Bathurst, where art and disaster flirted like old lovers who never learned restraint. The song was about almost dying, though I didn’t think the ladies needed that explanation.

When confronted by the microphone my old U87 gleaming like a relic of some vanished faith they froze. The game had become real. The strange man wanted them to sing and invent. How could he coax the goods out of them? By pretending not to care. By offering possibilities like breadcrumbs, trusting their instincts to find the trail. And it happened: the miracle of two untrained voices turning my live Swedish muddle into something wild and holy, a many-headed, many-hearted creature, half Danielson Family, half Mothers of Invention, entirely alive.