A summer of tree-planting made Ron Sexsmith a songwriter

Globe and Mail

04-07-2025

Before Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith became famous for gut-wrenching songs like Secret Heart, the so-called 'One-Man Jukebox' was known for his knack for covering other people's music. One pivotal summer, Sexsmith found both the confidence to write his own music and the money to make a demo deep in the Northern Canadian wilderness. In this week's 'How I Spent My Summer,' the 61-year-old rocker tells us how planting trees made him a musician proper.
I'd been playing music forever but knew I wanted to record a demo of my own stuff. The summer after I turned 20, someone told me I could make lots of money in a few months by tree-planting up in Northern Ontario. I went in for an interview with my friend, who was just as green as I was. When they saw us, they didn't think either of us could do it on our own, so they sort of hired us as one person.
They were right: I was a city kid from St. Catharines, Ont., and I hadn't done any real physical labour before. I wasn't a camper or an outdoors person. I didn't have any of the right gear and I was wearing the wrong footwear. We had to bring our own tents, but the guy that lent me my tent forgot the poles. Another planter had an extra tent, but I still felt like I was really roughing it. It was almost like being in the army or on M.A.S.H. or something.
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I was on a crew of about 30 and we'd all get up at 5 in the morning. We were lucky to have a cooking crew, so two or three people were in charge of food. They'd make these absolutely enormous breakfast buffets. We could all eat whatever we wanted, not only because we were young but also because we were burning calories all day long.
After breakfast, they'd drive us to whatever site they wanted us to plant that day. You had this belt to wear with bags attached, filled with baby trees. You plant the trees, you come back for more trees, you plant again, and you do that all day. Some people were great at it and planted 3,000 a day; I was doing 1,500, maybe. Slow-planters like me were called 'low-ballers.' The bugs took a liking to me and I was busy getting eaten alive.
When we started there was still snow on the ground and by the end of the season it was scorching. In between, sometimes there'd be four seasons in a day. Some days, you were cold, wet and miserable. But other days you'd find yourself on top of a hill overlooking a forest with the sun shining, and it'd be beautiful.
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I'd brought my guitar with me, and at night I'd sing around the campfire. It's wild because people came from all over the world to go tree-planting. There was a guy from Egypt, a fellow from Holland. There were different languages and different accents. I'd never really been anywhere before, so to see all these different cultures converging in the Canadian wilderness was so interesting. They had big opinions about art and politics – which I didn't have yet – as they were free spirits on the fringe like pirates or something. I think musicians are a bit like that too.
It's hard to put my finger on why, but meeting people from all over made my music better. One man from Louisiana would knock on my tent and say, 'Play me that Bob Dylan song again?' It reminded him of home. I saw the world more deeply and it came out in my music. It was also so good for my character to be cold, wet and dirty for four months. That summer is what made me a songwriter.
One by one, people quit – because of the elements, the black flies, the knowledge you were making like nine cents a tree. The friend I came with didn't last more than two weeks. Sometimes people would quit just because they couldn't stand the sight of a particular person anymore. I remember leaving on the last day, riding in the back of the truck on my way back to civilization. This feeling of pride came over me, like, man, I really did it. Of 30, there were only 11 of us left by the end of the season. I was so proud to be one of them.
As told to Rosemary Counter