Photo: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
In summer of 2025, Saskatchewan made its way into Chappell Roan’s song “The Subway,” apparently not because of its inherent poetry but because of practical necessity: the singer needed something to rhyme with a lyric, and said she had already used Boston in another track.
I made a promise, if in four months this feeling ain’t gone…
I’m movin’ to Saskatchewan
I, for one, am pleased that she seems to pronounce Saskatchewan correctly, without the common over exaggeration on the “wan”—even among fellow Canadians.
I’m also pleased that Saskatchewan continues to find its way into pop culture — long after the province’s darling Joni Mitchell cut a path for generations of songwriters — giving me an opportunity to speak about this little place I’m from and still deeply love (despite my own current view of palm trees and the ocean out my window in Southern California).
Her use of the province is funny, too, because it juxtaposes well with the song and video’s very cityscape scene. Saskatchewan is known for farming and fields mostly, despite having earned common, regular international attention in the arts and sciences. In truth, on Saskatoon’s main road into downtown from the East side, the driver will pass a literal farm, and this farm is one of the prizes of the province’s university as its agricultural education center.
I only became aware of this as one of the city’s quirks after living away from home for a while and coming back, and it makes me smile every time remember.
Affectionate smiles aside, little places like this matter profoundly, and as more than fodder for missing rhymed song lyrics.
All of us come from somewhere, and it truly matters. Although places like Los Angeles, where I now live, or New York, London, Milan, Vancouver have their glittery draw which I absolutely love, life in a smaller, unassuming place like Saskatchewan can be the foundation a person needs for a rich and full life.
I would say that’s been my case. I wouldn’t change where I’m from and where I was formed as a person and as a singer and writer for anything. I wouldn’t have the life I enjoy here in California without the beautiful and in many ways humble grounding I received growing up.
Small places really do matter.
It’s cold there for many months of the year with stretching white everywhere, and this becomes an avenue for creativity and shared, warm homes. We learn interdependence, and the loyalty of friends and family so often close by. People seem to necessarily have time and occasion for reflection about the deeper meaning of life, and direct experience of helping and being helped in a variety of ways. Our history is not-so-long-ago pioneers — people who built farms in the brutal Canadian prairie, with my own grandfather digging up deep-rooted bushes on their family’s plot of land for years as a young child before they could even attempt to plant. No one anticipated just how cold the winters would be while they waited for planting season. Many survived in sod dirt houses. A friend once told me her great-grandmother gave birth in a hollowed-out snow bank.
We see a deeper meaning and value of Saskatchewan rising in the midst of this history.
These are not old stories but memories that still lived fresh within our grandparents when we were growing up, and certainly formed our own parents, who formed us. Regardless of all of the fast-paced modern developments that have long taken root (I of course never knew a world without heated garages, full grocery stores with fresh exotic produce, and media streaming in through screens), that sense of both fragility and strength seems to persist even now.
In a world seemingly growing more complicated by the day and so many people experiencing both serious burnout and overstimulation, Saskatchewan still offers a spirit of simplicity and humanity that can revive the heart and mind. It naturally seems to bend toward deeper human relationships.
In a larger center, and especially those with year-round warm weather, a person can easily get lost because it seems much easier to lose that sense of human interdependence. Although it hasn’t been my experience at all and the place is full of incredible, loyal, creative people, many others who move here later in life mention that the first two years in Los Angeles are mostly marked by a devastating loneliness as someone struggles to make a couple of decent friends.
But ultimately, every place has its own precious, irreplaceable reality for which gratitude is due.
In properly-proportioned affection as my own home, I can happily proclaim that Saskatchewan has this exquisite irreplaceable quality, from its gorgeous “living skies” sunsets to its ocean-like waves of wheat, flax, and mustard, and from its bridge-covered river to its deep sense of warmth and hospitality nearly everywhere you go. The importance of place is real.
I hope Chappell Roan makes it there, but in some way miraculously encounters the place as it truly is and not only with the distance of a stadium singer.
It’s worth the encounter.
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The truth is, there is only so much I can say in a short essay about this beautiful place I still call home. Art and music — one of my main birthrights of growing up in Saskatchewan — is often better.
I wrote many songs about it, and these are available in the private archive.
If you’d like to hear them, you’re welcome there.
Access to the private archive is complimentary and sent by email.
It includes my ongoing writing and occasional invitations to be more deeply involved—made possible by generous patrons.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 