How Adam Baldwin’s song became a feature film

There’s a boat coming up from America / With caskets filled with cocaine /  There’s a goldmine out on the ocean / And a lighthouse in Little Lorraine – “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine,” Adam Baldwin

Songs are born in many different ways. Sometimes phrases written on bar napkins and scraps of paper spark ideas. Other times, melodies come on strong while driving in the middle of the night. For Adam Baldwin, and his song “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine” — now turned into a movie that premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) — this spark came in the most unlikeliest of places: a hearse.

In 2013, in Sydney, Cape Breton, Baldwin was a pallbearer for the funeral of his dearly departed friend Jay Smith. The guitarist for Matt Mays passed away far too soon, while the band was on tour.

“We were on our way to the graveyard in a hearse, and I was making small talk with the driver,” Baldwin recalls. “It turned out my dad knew him growing up in Louisbourg [NS]. The driver proceeded to tell me the story about how he and his brothers used his father’s funeral home in Louisbourg as a safe house for drug smuggling, tucking hash into the caskets.

“I had never met this man before — and it seemed like an awful lot to share with a complete and utter stranger — but I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to want to hold on to that!’”

For more than seven years, Baldwin held onto fragments from this hearse conversation. Then, like all artists, the pandemic hit, and tours were cancelled, so the singer-songwriter had a lot of time to think, alone at home.

“There was nothing else to do but focus on making up stories, and writing some songs,” he recalls. “It was the first time I really had to sit with that story. My father had a top secret job with the RCMP that eventually, as a youngster, I came to learn was doing surveillance. During the pandemic, I just started asking him questions about different drug busts. I also read, and I did more homework. I was then armed a little better to put pen to paper and write this song.”

“Lighthouse in Little Lorraine” is one of eight story-songs on Baldwin’s 2022 album Concertos and Serenades. In six minutes, verse by verse, the song tells the tale of a small Cape Breton community, where the dark road of desperation – caused by economic strife – leads an individual to tragic consequences.

“I figured if Gordon Lightfoot can put out an eight-minute song about a cargo ship, I might as well give it a go,” Baldwin laughs.

After playing keyboards and providing backing vocals with Matt Mays and El Torpedo for close to a decade, Baldwin – a Cape Breton-born singer-songwriter himself – left the band to pursue a solo career. He released his solo debut EP in 2013 and was named Male Artist and Musician of the Year during Nova Scotia Music week the following year. In the decade that’s followed, Baldwin has continued to write and release storytelling songs, like “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine,” that resonate with listeners.

Fellow Cape Bretoner (or “Caper”) Andy Hines was one of those listeners struck by the story in Baldwin’s song. The Grammy and JUNO-nominated music video director recalls how he first discovered it.

“Adam’s management passed along ‘Lighthouse in Little Lorraine’ before the album came out, to find out if I would be interested in making a music video,” says Hines. “I’ve known Adam for close to 20 years, and I’m a huge fan of his storytelling. After I heard that song, I immediately called him and said, ‘This is a movie I’d like to make!’”

Baldwin was skeptical. “I was in disbelief about the whole thing up until we started doing interviews about the movie,” he says. “In hindsight, I remember the day I met Andy, and it’s funny to think back to that day, and how our paths went off in different directions, and then have come careening back into each other in such a manner.”

From hearse hearsay to TIFF: The making of the movie

Catching up with Baldwin and Hines a couple of days before Little Lorraine’s TIFF premiere, the pair share more about the journey from the song to the director’s feature film debut. Hines explains that the configuration required for a successful film already existed in Baldwin’s song.

“The structure is there,” the director says. “If you listen to the song, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. The most difficult parts of the initial process of writing a script were already present in the storytelling of the song, so it was about filling in the gaps, and making it tie together in a way that we could create the characters that had a life of their own.”

As Hines adds in the press package for Little Lorraine, “my roots in Nova Scotia have deeply influenced my perception of this story.”

The feature film, starring best-selling Colombian artist J Balvin (in his big-screen debut); Sean Astin (The Goonies; The Lord of the Rings; Stranger Things); and Rhys Darby was well-received at TIFF, by audiences and critics alike. What resonated most was the humanity of the characters, along with the struggle and strife faced by small communities everywhere that are fighting progress – and the machinations of late-stage capitalism – to preserve their traditional ways of life.

Little Lorraine was not only J Balvin’s film debut, but Baldwin also makes a cameo. The singer-songwriter can’t thank Hines enough for the opportunities this movie-making experience provided. “Last summer, he told me to come up to the set in Cape Breton and give it a shot,” Baldwin recalls. “There was no script. He just said, ‘make fun of these guys walking down the dock,’ and that [poking fun] tends to come naturally to me!’

“I was thrilled to be in the film, but more importantly, if I hadn’t taken Hines up on his offer I wouldn’t have seen the scale of the production that was going on in my father’s hometown,” says Baldwin. “It was such a privilege to think I had a hand in bringing some excitement to that long-sleepy town. Andy was always insistent the film be shot in the place where the story emanates from, and I’m grateful for him sticking to those guns.”