The very first version of this song came about way back in the fall of 2001. At the time I was working as an environmental project manager for a large consulting company that specialized in mine closures. In August and early September I was supervising the closure of waste site for a gypsum mine in Southern Ontario near the City of Hamilton.
Most of the projects that my crew and I worked on were in remote parts of the world and being so close to a large city was something of a novelty for us. We were used to living and working out of remote trailers and having to live on trailer-brewed coffee 24/7. Being close to amenities such as coffee shops was something of a bonus and we really made the most of it, hitting the local Tim Horton’s at least five times a day (on the way to work, at morning coffee, at lunch, at afternoon coffee and then at the end of the day).
One of the things that struck me was the number of cars that were always lined up at the drive-thru. I’m not exaggerating when I say in the song that there were 42 cars in the drive-thru line because many times there were that many or more and I even counted them one day – thus the 42. I used that experience along with some other experiences (like trying to find decent coffee in the US) to come up with the basic song.
There’s a touch of a sad note to this story – we wrapped up the project on the morning of September 11, 2001 and were oblivious to what was happening south of the border until we stopped off at our head office in Mississauga on our way home to Sudbury. The whole building had stopped everything and everyone was glued to the TV screens watching the attacks on the Trade Center. We were all numb from the shock.
Twenty years later, JK and I were pondering how we wanted to work this song into the album. It’s a fun ditty but JK figured we could do a bit more with it – and he was right – as always. We decided that we should vary the choruses so that we could get more detail and add a few more chuckles and snickers. After several hours of brainstorming we came up with all of the new choruses and the new version of “Tim Horton’s Junkie” was born.