Growing Up in Canada in 1966

Now you say your'e leavin' home 'cause you want to be alone. Ain't it funny how you feel when you're findin' out its real?

Oh, to live on sugar mountain with the barkers and the colored balloons. You can't be twenty on sugar mountain though your'e thinking that you're leaving there too soon, you're leaving there too soon.

The Response Part I

In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock'n'roll band (...) he had just newly turned 21, and that meant he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which was kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get in there anymore; so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. (...) And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game.

The Response Part II

So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty. Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty before the last revolving year is through.

And the seasons they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down, we’re captive on the carousel of time. We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the circle game.