LIKE A KNIFE THROUGH MY HEART by Skye Wallace

When I was four years old, my grandpa had a Randy Travis album he played all the time, Always & Forever, his second album. I got hold of the tape and carried it around everywhere. I learned all the words, without knowing what they meant; I was obsessed with it.

I was a pretty passionate little kid, very dramatic and in tune with my emotions, and somehow those songs really lit a fire in me. I didn’t understand a thing about music, but they got me from a raw emotional standpoint. “I Told You So” was the song that really grabbed me; it’s so heartwrenchingly dramatic. The first line—about calling someone up for the first time to tell them you love them—kills me. It was like a knife through my heart.

As I’ve grown and become a musician, I’ve learned to appreciate what makes that album great. It’s such a crisp and cohesive whole, the players are so in tune, the pedal steel soars. All the emotions are really well articulated; the arrangements are so well done. He’s a Christian country singer, which is not my thing at all, but that album has subtly influenced all of my music. A little over two years ago I was going through a severe depression and Always & Forever was a saviour; listening to it calmed me down, made me feel that everything was going to be all right. In my own songs I’ve tried to tap into that sort of emotion. As a woman, it’s really important to me to tell stories that haven’t been heard or are ignored. My latest single, “Swing Batter,” is based on a true story: the 1911 trial of Angelina Napolitano in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. After years of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, a pregnant Napolitano attacked and killed him with an axe. She was sentenced to death following the birth of her child, but while she waited in prison for her baby to be born, there was an international outcry from early feminist groups arguing she had acted in self-defence. Her sentence was later lessened to life, and she was released after eleven years.

It really threw me when I heard that story; there’s so much anger in it. I wanted to evoke that, give power to it in song. One of the first times I played “Swing Batter” was in Sault Ste. Marie, where the audience all knew the story (there was a movie made about it in 2005 called Looking for Angelina). It was really amazing to first bring it to a crowd of people who felt it personally, the way I did.

When I released the song, people told me how much it had touched them; a couple of women with a history of abuse even reached out to tell me they felt moved, empowered, and not alone. It felt so good to be able to help, to connect with someone in that way. The way Randy Travis connected with me when I was four years old.

Skye Wallace is a classically trained singer with East Coast roots who discovered punk rock in her youth. She released her second album, Something Wicked, in 2016 and is working on a new one that focuses on stories of women from across Canada; “Swing Batter” will be on it.