A local musician has released a song about all things Gimli.
Wanda Sparkes, a long-time singer and Gimli local, has shared her latest work with the community — Whiskey Train to Gimli. The soft, melodic tune tells of taking the train to Gimli, humbly dubbed the “whiskey train,” to pay homage to the home of Crown Royal.
“It just made me nostalgic for the train because Arborg would have a train come into town when I was a little girl,” said Sparkes. “I think everybody loves trains.”
Sparkes grew up singing with her sisters. As she got older, she tried to learn guitar and started writing her own music, but she didn’t share anything she created. She then became a teacher and put aside her music for years until her nephew became a music producer and opened his own studio in Winnipeg.
Sparkes started recording a few songs for fun, posting them to her YouTube channel and sharing them within the local Facebook groups, but never singing herself on the tracks. Over the winter, she decided she wanted to record two of her songs herself, and after finishing the scratch tracks in the studio, she recorded one more on a whim.
“It’s a bucket list thing,” said Sparkes. “And my grandkids can listen to them one day.”
That last song she recorded was “Whiskey Train to Gimli”. Sparkes was at Maximillian Dupas’s home studio and after showing him the song on ukulele, he played it on his guitar for the recording, accompanying Sparkes’ vocals beautifully.
Using videos other locals had taken of the trains in Gimli, Sparkes created a compilation video to go with the song on YouTube. As she sings about putting on her purple robes and dawning her crown, images of trains rolling through town flash on the screen.
“A lot of my ideas I get when I’m driving or going for a walk,” she said. “I thought maybe I got the idea seeing the train when I was out.”
That — and hearing a friend label her video as “taking the whiskey train to Gimli — inspired the song. Sparkes looked up common phrases Crown Royal uses and stuck some of them in the song too.
Sparkes doesn’t record or write music with any end goal in mind. She simply loves the act of writing and singing and the process of recording a song.
“It’s so cool as you see it progress from some goofy thing you made on your ukulele to something that sounds good,” she said.
Sparkes is recording the final versions of her other two songs soon and hopes to have them done before Christmas.
