I started this song from the simple call and response guitar riff. I played around with a chord progression and pretty soon the melody came to me with the words “I’ll Never Understand Why”. As I started to record it in my home studio, the lyrics fell into place.

I feel so lucky to live where I do, here in Canada. We’re pretty sheltered from the reality of the stressed lives that other people face in the world; it’s hard to fathom the conditions we see on TV - a world of great inequality and hate - and I don’t know how we can fix it.

Credits:
I worked out the form of this song on my Triton workstation. Once I recorded the main parts, I added some of my guitar playing (Firebird) and used my Mel 9 pedal for a couple of the drone-y sounds. Jamie Philp also added to the ambiance with his Steinberger Synapse guitar. Daryl Kozub sang some ‘colour’ vocals, doubling my vocal parts here and there and creating some really special subtleties. Near the end of the song, I played the bells, tambourines and kalimba. That haunting woodwind instrument you hear is the duduk, performed by my old friend Mark Korven. The duduk is an ancient Armenian double-reed instrument. When I was working on “I’ll Never Understand Why”, I imagined how it would sound with the haunting duduk. I went to Mark’s website and found a piece that he played, copied it and flew it into my recording session. It was amazing that the key he was playing in, as well as the tempo, worked perfectly. I knew it was just the sound I wanted in my song, so I emailed Mark and asked him if he would improvise a few sections for “I’ll Never Understand Why”. Mark recorded his duduk in his home studio in Toronto and sent it back to me by email. The result is what you hear on this track. It’s stunning, and just what I was looking for. Mark Korven has had a successful career as a soundtrack composer for many documentaries and movies. He recently created the soundtrack for "The Witch," a feature film that won the prize for best direction at the Sundance Film Festival.