Songs about lost loves are about a dime a dozen, and the authors—or victims—of each one will tell you that theirs was special, that there was no love quite like theirs and, as a result, their song inherently rings out with the purity of a uniquely heartfelt experience.
Cookie cutter. The lot of them. They each pale in comparison to real suffering like the totally incomparable to the heartbreak experienced by Get Real! guitarist and vocalist, Andrew MacDonald, who once gave up a subpar Stratocaster and it has haunted him ever since.
“Daphne,” the latest single from the band, sounds like it stems from the same stock of woeful pining found in any other heartbroken lament, but the truth is so much more painful.
“Back when we first started the band, I had this Strat that was the colour Daphne Blue, hence the name of the song,” says MacDonald. “It had some issues with it that mildly annoyed me and I ended up selling it for pretty cheap and pretty much felt like a chump.”
Selling his Strat, however idiosyncratic an instrument it proved to be, turned out to be a mistake MacDonald would come to regret—even to the point of trying to recover it. He had owned that guitar from the formative years between the age of 17 and 22 and, with it he had written “Bittersweet,” the band’s first real song.
Naturally, he was devastated.
“I spent a while after that scrolling through Kijiji hoping I’d encounter my guitar being sold again and I could buy it back,” says MacDonald.
“I think I was mostly attached to the memories behind it, not the actual guitar itself. I was upset that I’d given away the guitar I spent years writing stupid songs on and playing music with my friends with.”
Clearly still with his misplaced muse on his mind, “Daphne” emerged as a song one night while scouring the darkest regions of the web.
“I was just looking at listings and had an acoustic guitar in my hand and started playing that main guitar riff you hear in the post-chorus. The ‘daphne, daphne, daphne blue…’ melody combined with that just had some nostalgic feeling to it, which to me is the core vibe of the song,” says MacDonald, referring to the raw edge trailing along its mantric call.
“It made me feel the warm summer day when I went out with my friends to buy the guitar, and afterward when we got back to my parents’ house and jammed with it. That bittersweet feeling of a day lost to time.”
MacDonald still hasn’t been able to recover his lost daphne blue Stratocaster. He might have a better chance of it though, now that he’s got a song out about it…