Album
Hockey Tunes
Album · 7 tracks · June 2024 · by Mike Baker
Seven rink-born songs about goalies, teammates, inside jokes, and the strange joy of caring too much about beer-league hockey.
The story
Hockey Tunes is exactly what the title says. Seven songs that came out of playing hockey, hanging around rinks, giving friends shit, and spending an unreasonable amount of time willingly standing in front of flying pucks.
There was never some grand concept behind this album. Hockey is one of the things I love doing, and beer-league hockey produces an endless supply of characters, jokes, frustration, and material that deserves a song every once in a while.
A few tracks are inside jokes that escaped the locker room. The goalie songs are more personal because that position gets into your head in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have played it. You are alone in the crease, watching everything develop, knowing the next mistake might be yours, and somehow loving the whole damn thing enough to keep coming back.
Mostly, though, this record is for fun. Hockey gave me the stories. I turned some of them into songs.
If you only have a few minutes
Start here
01Big Ass Screen
The joke becomes funnier once you know Andrew is doing exactly what a good player should do. The song turns a friend's skill at blocking my view into the kind of complaint that belongs among teammates.
02The Goalie
This is the clearest look inside the position. It holds the nerves, isolation, quick recovery, and unreasonable satisfaction that keep drawing me back to the crease.
03Small Town Goalie
The closing track brings hockey down to its actual scale in my life: a cold rink, late ice, a giant equipment bag, and a game that feels important while it is happening.
Tracks
- 01F You Adam
- 02Nick The Ice King
- 03Big Ass Screen
- 04The Goalie
- 05The Goalie's Prayer
- 06She's A Warrior On The Ice
- 07Small Town Goalie
Track by track
01F You Adam
There is an Adam, and we actually like him.
“F You Adam” came from one of those locker-room traditions where affection takes a slightly hostile form. Adam walks in, somebody says it, everybody knows the joke, and life continues.
Eventually I did the only reasonable thing and turned it into a song.
There is no deeper message here. Adam has the honor of having one of the least flattering songs in my catalog named after him. That feels appropriate.
02Nick The Ice King
Every rink has people who become part of the place.
“Nick The Ice King” is one of those hockey-character songs. Take a guy, give him a title that sounds much more important than anything happening in beer league, add some music, and suddenly local rink mythology exists.
Nick got to be the Ice King. Good for Nick.
03Big Ass Screen
This one is about my friend Andrew, who is annoyingly good at screening me.
For the non-hockey crowd, a good screen means putting your body between the goalie and the puck so the goalie cannot see the shot coming. Andrew understands this assignment very well.
Unfortunately, I am the goalie.
So there I am trying to track the puck while Andrew plants himself in front of me and gives me an unobstructed view of his ass instead. Move one direction, Andrew is still there. Try looking around the other side, same problem. Somewhere behind him there is apparently a hockey game happening.
That became “Big Ass Screen.” The entire song is me complaining that my friend is doing his job correctly.
I hate when he does it. Which means Andrew should absolutely keep doing it.
04The Goalie
Goalies are a strange group of people, and I am completely comfortable admitting I belong to them.
You voluntarily put yourself in the one position where everybody notices when you screw up. A forward misses the net and play continues. A goalie misses the puck and somebody turns on a red light.
Then you have to forget about it because another shot is coming.
That is the part of goaltending I love. There is almost no room for bullshit in the crease. Some nights you feel locked in and see everything. Other nights a puck sneaks through that you know you should have stopped and you spend the next few seconds arguing with yourself inside a helmet.
Then you reset.
“The Goalie” is about that particular energy. The nerves before the game, the weird focus once it starts, the satisfaction of stealing a save, and the absolute rage of knowing you let in a shitty one.
For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I love being back there.
05The Goalie's Prayer
Every goalie wants the same things before a game.
Let me see the puck. Give me a decent bounce once in a while. Please keep somebody from standing completely untouched in my crease. If my defense wants to clear a rebound tonight, I would be grateful.
“The Goalie’s Prayer” takes all of that and turns it into the closest thing beer-league hockey has to religion.
Goalies are full of routines, habits, equipment preferences, and little superstitions we pretend are completely reasonable. Then the puck drops and none of it matters if you are half a second late getting across the crease.
You prepare anyway. You get in the net, tap the posts, settle in, and hope the hockey gods are not assholes tonight.
06She's A Warrior On The Ice
This one is a celebration of girls playing hockey.
The sport is fast, physical, demanding, and a hell of a lot of fun. Watching girls find confidence on the ice, compete hard, become teammates, and fall in love with the game deserves its own hockey song.
“She’s A Warrior On The Ice” came from that energy. Get on the ice. Play hard. Have fun. That is enough.
07Small Town Goalie
This is the goalie song that feels closest to the hockey I actually know.
No huge arena. No television cameras. No thousands of people watching.
There is a cold rink, a giant bag of equipment, a late ice time, some friends, and a goalie who still cares way too much about whether that puck crosses the line.
That is me.
Beer-league stakes are wonderfully ridiculous. Nobody is scouting us. Nobody is going to remember the score next month. I will still be irritated driving home if I let in one I should have stopped. And I will absolutely remember the save I had no business making.
“Small Town Goalie” is about loving the position without needing it to be anything bigger than it is. I put on the gear. I skate into the crease. For however long the game lasts, stopping that puck becomes the most important job in the world.
Then the game ends, I take off the pads, and I go home. A few days later, I want to do it again.
That is hockey.
Where it leads
Hockey Tunes brought real names, local jokes, and a life outside the music into the catalog. Heartfelt Heroes carried that same specificity into the part of my life with far greater stakes: the people of Heritage Health and the communities they serve.
One project, three records
The hockey records
Three albums about the same thing: beer-league hockey, the people at the rink, and what the crease does to your head. They were made a year apart but they belong together.