Jessica Towler passes them every day on the drive home …
Roadside memorials line her route, and at some point the sheer number of them started to get to her. Each one marked a person she would never know anything about. She couldn’t stop wondering who they were.
What was their name? How old were they? Were they having a good day or a bad one? Who got the phone call, and who was there when it happened? What did they leave behind?
Those questions became “Highway Flowers.”
The songwriter behind it
Towler has been performing since she was three years old, and that early love of the stage turned into a passion for songwriting and storytelling not long after. Her sound leans on country storytelling and honest lyrics, with melodies built to stick.
Her single “Sunday Girl” reached the Top 10 on the Indie Canadian Country charts and picked up airplay on Canadian country radio. Across her independently released singles, she’s passed 130,000 streams on Spotify.
She’s played Canada’s Largest Ribfest, Cineplex’s In Our Party Era, and the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto. She also took the stage at The Rec Room in Toronto for a Taylor Swift tribute show, playing to two sold-out rooms full of Swifties.
It started in the back seat of a minivan
The habit of noticing these memorials goes back to her childhood, and to one specific moment she still remembers clearly.
“I remember the first time I saw a bouquet of teddy bears and flowers tied to a light post. What I thought was a cute fun decoration soon turned to sadness after I asked my mom from the back seat of our family minivan. Since then I notice every memorial, I take a moment to think about those affected.”
Country music has always made room for grief, but most of those songs are written from inside the loss. “Highway Flowers” comes at it from the shoulder of the road, from someone passing by who knows only that a life ended there and that somebody, somewhere, took a phone call they’ll never forget.
Towler will never learn most of their names. The song is her way of saying they had one.
In country music, the Front Porch has long been a place of reflection. A place where you can look at the life you have inside that front door. A place where time almost seems to stand still, where you can get away. It’s also a place where you can go to observe the world as it passes by you. To think about your place out there beyond the driveway.
