Chantal Kreviazuk tells the emotional story behind 'Surrounded'

While Chantal Kreviazuk is participating as a panellist on Canada Reads this week, defending The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, she is best known for her two-decade career as a singer-songwriter.

Kreviazuk's "Surrounded" is a hit from her 1997 album Under these Rocks and Stones. Here, she describes the song's intensely emotional origins.

"I think that the song 'Surrounded' really jumps out at me as a song worth reflecting on in terms of the creative process because it really brings to mind the reason for me for singing, for writing songs. It really brings me back to how music is [...] here to heal us, it's here to comfort, it's here to manifest pain and suffering, the human suffering we all experience regardless of where we're born. We are all born with struggle and being a part of the human experience, so I wrote music, that was my coping mechanism."

"I don't do drugs, I'm highly dependent on piano, I'm highly dependent on manifesting my feelings into my creativity. And so when I was about 18, the boy I loved as a teenager, he was amazing, he was really an amazing guy. Everybody was just kind of in awe of him and he had a lot of phenomenal qualities and, I think, almost too much awesomeness for this world and it ended badly. He had a quick turnaround with, I think, schizophrenia, which led to a psychotic depression. And he found an old antique gun and figured out how to make the thing work and he took his life.

"And that was a really horrible night [...] I was serving at a restaurant and I called [home] to ask if I could keep the car and my dad told me on the phone I needed to come home — there was something in his voice and I really panicked and I said, 'You need to tell me,' and he told me that Samuel was dead and had killed himself. And that was a very traumatic event [...] and I think I probably was, myself, not mentally well for a good year at least. Certainly it's impacted my whole journey. Eventually I wrote the song 'Surrounded' about [Samuel] and about what it felt like to be told something so horrible."

— Del Cowie, q digital staff