After landing in an irrigation ditch filled with water and nearly drowning in his car at 17 years old, Brad Strang made a promise to always write songs that were uplifting and inspiring.
A lifetime of honouring that promise later and happily in retirement, Strang, who lives in Quesnel, created the BC Strong song he just released, which has been ruminating in his mind for a few years now.
"We've seen the fires, we've seen the floods, and we've seen how resilient BC residents are and how much we help each other," Strang said.
Community is so important during times of crisis and he's seen that so often during his lifetime, he added.
In his own neighbourhood during the wildfires a few years back, he had evacuees from 100 Mile House and Williams Lake staying at his house who were filled with distress and anxiety over their plight and so to keep the neighbourhood morale uplifted he would host mock backyard 'fires' by putting orange Christmas lights in the firepit with some wood.
"We'd have a jam session 'around the fire'. People went with it so as the night wore on you'd see people inching their chairs closer to the 'fire' - it was just a force of habit - it was really something," Strang laughed at the recollection. "We looked after each other and the neighbours as a group made a plan on how we'd help each other if we had to evacuate."
When the floods hit during the pandemic, it was such a personally stressful time as he experienced a flood in Yarrow in the 60s, where he grew up on a raspberry farm and it was just devastating, he said. He knew how the farmers felt, how it felt to experience that kind of loss and the clean up that had to be done and then a friend spent two months in an induced coma here in Prince George's hospital.
"He managed to survive and pull through but he's not 100 per cent and probably won't recover completely," Strang said. "So we've seen the good in people supporting one another through all that."
And he believes the floods were the catalyst to inspire him to really sit down and write the BC Strong song.
"In the last few years every time there has been so much tragedy and every time we're faced with new challenges in BC everybody just seems to pitch in," Strang said. "There's a lot of good stories out there of people giving what they can and helping each other. It fit right in with what I wanted to do with my music and I just wanted to give people something they could hum along to. I wanted to keep it simple and remind people that we can work together and that's how we get through all of this stuff. I want to remind everyone how resilient we are here in British Columbia."
