Vanessa Cardui IF

Vanessa Cardui is an outlandish and daring musician with an alarming tendency to swing between the whimsical and the tragic. She has written hundreds of songs in various genres, including rock, folk, filk, and choral music, plays nine different instruments, and has a special love of historical and mythological subject matter. Her debut solo album, Thought Experiment, received high acclaim for its authenticity and bold emotional content. High on the success of Thought Experiment, Vanessa went on to release musical tributes to two Canadian subcultures: The Wine-Dark Sea for the pagan community, and Filk and Cookies for sci-fi/fantasy fandom. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, her 2017 album, Patience, represented a new level of sophistication and production quality. She was Consonance's Interfilk guest in 2019 and FilKONtario's 2022 Guest of Honour.

Website: vanessacarduiartist.com/
Bandcamp: vanessacardui.bandcamp.com

Representative Work for the 2024 Pegasus Awards

Joe (mp3)

Copyright ©Vanessa Cardui
All Rights Reserved - Used by permission

The details of my parents' lives are not well documented,
But eight boys and one baby girl were born and soon lamented. But ten was more tenacious, and once born, refused to die,
So Mátyás József Farkas lived, and that boy who lived was I.

I made it.

I'm not sure that they wanted me, and I didn't know them long,
I was on my own when our little home began crackling with bombs. I packed a bag, I locked the house, I gave away the key,
And I crossed into my parents' homeland as a refugee.

I made it... but I didn't stay long.
I made it... but I was only fifteen,
And no help on a farm or in a restaurant.
But I did find work that would take me far,
And keep me busy to the end of the war,
Helping out the German army with their horses and their carts.

My clothes got tight and I saw I'd grown,
I was given some black garb in place of my own,
The war ended in May, I was on my way, I had made it!
Now I'd never really been a patient kid,
Which should partly explain the next thing that I did:
I started home without getting rid
Of my black and damning clothes,
And they scooped me up with their other fallen foes.

It was a two-week march,
They only fed us once,
One loaf of bread, and some meat that I ate half raw.
You could get shot if you took too long to shit,
And we drank from the ditch,
The same water that soaked the corpses of men like me.

Men just like me.

Three months in camp was a little like life,
I met the father of my future wife,
We needed a chess set, so I found a knife, and I made it.
I kept the knife and I didn't get caught,
I didn't get sick, and I didn't get shot,
I guess some are lucky and some are not, but I made it.

I made it!
I made it!
They let us go, and I went where they spoke my tongue.
And I did what a good man does:
I supported a wife and kids,
And for once, my life became about more than just me.
No, not just me.

The fall of 1956 was turbulence and fear,
The slaughter in our streets needs no elaboration here.
Our muddy trek to freedom was the hardest of my life,
I made it only goaded by my strong, beloved wife.

There was one moment when we might have died,
The machine gun sprayed when our baby cried,
And we bit the mud, and if they'd really tried,
Then there would be no song.
Some thieves took a chance then to rob us blind,
We were crossing a border, they crossed a line,
But we crossed in time, and when I read a sign in German...

I knew we'd made it!
We made it!
My children and my grandchildren are Canucks.
‘Cause I chose not to live in fear,
And had some amazing luck.
(And in all my life, I never buried one kid.
They all survived, like none of my siblings did.)

Kedves nagypapa, I hope you don't mind,
I told your story as though it was mine,
It might have been wrong that I made this song, but I made it.
You brought us here, and some of us died,
But a dozen of us are still alive,
A dozen descendants with shining lives, we made it!

We made it!
We made it!
Your love and courage pulled us from the abyss.
And I thank you, for all of this,
The opportunity to exist.
I'll remember you and honour all that you did.
The loving man I knew when I was a kid.