THUNDER BAY -- The Tragically Hip have been there every step of the way throughout my adult life. I’ve seen a lot of concerts, but no band more than the 13 times I’ve seen the quintet from Kingston, Ont.
First introduced to them by a high school friend in Halifax, over the years a Tragically Hip album release date became a holiday celebration for me. I’d race to the record store as soon as it opened, peel back the plastic and spend the day – or the week – devouring it.
Needless to say, like many Canadian music fans, I was stunned and saddened to learn that lead singer Gord Downie had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. It still seems surreal. I was lucky enough to score tickets to the Hip’s Winnipeg show earlier this month, a memory I’ll treasure forever.
On Saturday they’ll play what’s expected to be their final show in Kingston, where it all began. The concert will be streamed live at Marina Park at 8:30 p.m.
In honour of their farewell, I put together a list of my top 50 favourite Hip songs. It wasn't an easy task, they're all great songs and there were plenty that didn't make my top 50. You may agree with my list, you may not. You probably have your list in a different order. Feel free to share your own memories and favourite tracks in the comment section below. I'd love to hear what you think.
I'm going to dedicate this effort to two people who share my love of all things Hip: my Diamond Dawgs slo-pitch teammate Chris Sabourin, who's seen the band 16 times and my Thunder Bay Television colleague Jonathan Wilson, who's travelled further than anyone I know to see them on stage, including Woodstock '99.
1. At the Hundredth Meridian
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: The song’s title refers to the imaginary line that divides Western Canada from the east – where the great plains begin. On stage Gord Downie would often stop midway through and go on one of his famous stream-of-consciousness rants, a frenzied finish to follow. The song also introduced a new generation to blues great Ry Cooder, who the narrator announces he wants to sing his eulogy.
Favourite lyric: “It would seem to me, I remember every single f**king thing I know.”
2. Nautical Disaster
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes: It’s one of two tracks the Hip performed on Saturday Night Live in 1995, their appearance a condition former cast member and Kingston, Ont. native Dan Aykroyd insisted upon in agreeing to return to do a guest spot on the NBC show. In the Canadian rock history book, Have Not Been the Same, Downie says the haunting song is about the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck.
Favourite lyric: “Settled in, into the pocket of a lighthouse on some rocky socket, off the coast of France, dear.”
3. New Orleans is Sinking
Album: Up to Here (1989)
Song notes: Likely their most played song on Canadian radio, the song was 16th on CBC Radio’s 2005 series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. After Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans in 2005, the song was temporarily pulled from several American stations.On stage, it became famous for the extended jam played midway through by the band, often a testing ground for new songs, including Nautical Disaster and Ahead by a Century.
Favourite lyric: “My memory is muddy, what’s this river that I’m in? New Orleans is sinkingman and I don’t want to swim.”
4. Ahead By a Century
Album: Trouble at the Henhouse (1996)
Song notes: Nominated for best Canadian single at the 1997 Juno Awards, according to Wikipedia it’s the best charted song in the Tragically Hip’s three-decade history. It’s a nostalgic look at young love, a recurring theme for the band over the years.
Favourite lyric: “First thing we’d climb a tree and maybe then we’d talk. Or sit silently and listen to our thoughts.”
5. Wheat Kings
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: The haunting story of David Milgaard, wrongly convicted in 1970 for the rape of a Saskatoon nursing student. He spent 23 years in prison for something he didn’t do.
Favourite lyric: “Late breaking story on the CBC, a nation whispered ’We always knew that he’d go free.’”
6. Bobcaygeon
Album: Phantom Power (1998)
Song notes: Named after the tiny town of Bobcaygeon, Ont. – but not inspired by it – the song details the narrator’s disgust at the Nazi-fueled Christie Pits riots that struck Toronto in 1933 and the simpler small-town life afforded in a place like the title town. GordDownie has said any town could have fit the bill, but he chose Bobcaygeon because its name “rhymes with constellation … sort of.” The song won the 2000 Juno Award for single of the year.
Favourite lyric: “Till the man they couldn’t hang, stepped to the mic and sang, and their voices rang with that Aryan twang.”
7. Little Bones
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: Legend has it the song was crafted in New Orleans and Little Bones is a cat in Timothy Findlay’s novel The Last of the Crazy People. On the 2004 Yer Favourites DVD, at the end of the song Downie screams, “If I get no more use out of my voice than that, I would love to find my tiny, little calico cat.”
Favourite lyric: “Baby eat this chicken slow, it’s full of all them little bones.”
8. 38 Years Old
Album: Up to Here (1989)
Song notes: A fictionalized retelling of a prison break from Millhaven Institution, the narrator’s brother the lone hometown shame of the dozen who escaped. In reality, 14, not 12, inmates broke free.
Favourite lyric: “He’s 38 years old, never kissed a girl.”
9. Courage (For Hugh MacLennan)
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: The song was inspired by MacLennan’s novel, The Watch that Ends the Night, “Interpreted by some people to be about someone’s contemplations of suicide,” according to canadianbands.com.
Favourite lyric: “Courage, my word, it didn’t come, it doesn’t matter.”
10. Scared
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes:The song references the Nazi desire to pillage Russia of its artworks in the Second World War, but also delves into the origins of marketing focus groups. According to thehipmuseum.com, Gord Downie often introduces the song by mentioning a “lighthouse keeper or encyclopedia salesman whose services were no longer needed.”
Favourite lyric: “When the Nazis find the whole place dark, they’ll think God’s left the museum for good.”
11. Boots or Hearts
Album: Up to Here (1989)
Song notes: A bitter break-up song if there ever was one. When things fall apart, like boots or hearts, they really fall apart.
Favourite lyric: “I feel I’ve stepped out of the wilderness, all squint-eyed and confused. But even babies raised by wolves, they know exactly when they’ve been used.”
12. Poets
Album: Phantom Power (1998)
Song notes: A No. 1 hit in Canada that stayed at the top of the RPM alternative chart for a dozen weeks, the song touches on the dangers of mass farming and pornography and is critical of environmental and social critics – the poets – who talk tough but accomplish little.
Favourite lyric: “Lava flowing in superfarmer’s direction, he’s been getting reprieve from the heat in the frozen food section.”
13. My Music at Work
Album: Music at Work (2000)
Song notes: In the video for the song, Downie is an office worker with an apparent double life – he’s also the lead singer of a band named The Filters, a stark contrast from the rest of the workplace drones he sets out to reinvigorate. It hit No. 2 on the Canadian charts. The song’s title was lifted from the slogan of a Toronto rock radio station.
Favourite lyric: “Everything is bleak. It’s the middle of the night. You’re all alone and the dummies might be right.”
14. Locked in the Trunk of a Car
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: According to canadianbands.com, the song is “sort of a fictional first-hand account of a serial killer from his eyes.”
Favourite lyric: “It’s a cool, sweet kinda place where the copters won’t spot it.”
15. Vaccination Scar
Album: In Between Evolution (2004)
Song notes: Like many songs on the album, Vaccination Scar has an anti-war message directed at the U.S. involvement in Iraq, comparing its execution at one point to the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The title refers to the smallpox vaccination scar found on the upper left arms of millions of Canadians born in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Favourite lyric: “The sky looks threatened, heading home in the dust, singing, ‘Life is for getting, good enough for the frivolous.”
16. Gift Shop
Album: Trouble at the Henhouse (1996)
Song notes: According to the hipmuseum.com, Gift Shop is about the Grand Canyon and the commercialization of one of the world’s greatest natural attractions.
Favourite lyric: “And after a glimpse, over the top. The rest of the world becomes a gift shop.”
17. Fifty-Mission Cap
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: The Hip’s classic hockey song, it tells the tale of former Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko, who scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1951, then was killed in a plane crash that summer. His fate was a mystery for 11 years.
Favourite lyric: “They didn’t win another till 1962, the year he was discovered.”
18. Blow at High Dough
Album: Up to Here (1989)
Song notes: According to hipmuseum.com, “Don’t blow at high dough” is a saying Gord Downie’s grandmother used, suggesting one shouldn’t get ahead of one’s self “or attempt to walk before you’ve crawled.” The song was also the theme song of the CBC show Made in Canada.
Favourite lyrics:“They shot a movie once, in my hometown. Everybody was in it, for miles around.”
19. Twist My Arm
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: The song’s opening line name checks famed French marine biologist Jacques Cousteau. It also has plenty of religious overtones. It’s the third single off Road Apples and reached No. 22 on the Canada RPM charts in 1991.
Favourite lyric: “Martyrs don’t do much for me, though I enjoy them vicariously.”
20. Escape is at Hand for the Traveling Man
Album: Phantom Power (1998)
Song notes: A tribute to Material Issue front-man Jim Ellison, who committed suicide at 32 in 1996. He and the band met at a concert and got along famously, but Ellison killed himself shortly afterward, before a true friendship could develop.
Favourite lyric: “We talk a little about our bands, talk a little of our future plans.”
21. The Darkest One
Album: In Violet Light (2002)
Song notes: The song’s video includes Don Cherry and the Trailer Park Boys, Gord promising the Boys a bucket of chicken if they steal a motor for him.
Favourite lyric: “Where the wild are strong, and the strong are the darkest ones.”
22. Fireworks
Album: Phantom Power (1998)
Song notes: A song about coming of age in Canada in the ‘70s, complete with the grip of artificial chaos.
Favourite lyric: “You held my hand and we walked home the long way, you were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr.”
23. So Hard Done By
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes: Cinema a’clef is a movie term in which a character or event is actually based on someone or something real. To be hard done by is to think you’ve suffered a terrible fate, when in fact it’s not really all that big a deal.
Favourite lyric: “In an epic too small to be tragic, you’ll have to wait a minute ‘cause it’s an instamatic.”
24. Long Time Running
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: A song of divorce, from the father’s point of view, after a breakup with a wife who’s bitter at the end of the marriage. The father worries the mother is saying bad things about him.
Favourite lyric: “Does your mother tell you things? Long, long when I’m gone?”
25. Thugs
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes: The opening line was lifted almost verbatim from a 1977 movie, The People That Time Forgot. The song is about a couple who drive each other crazy, but don’t want to be with anyone else.
Favourite lyric: “Everyone’s got their breaking point. With me it’s spiders, with you it’s me.”
26. Small Town Bringdown
Album: The Tragically Hip EP (1987)
Song notes: From their debut EP, Smalltown Bringdown is about a guy who relishes the role of being big fish in a little pond and is oblivious to the fact people think he’s a loser for not trying to move on to better things.
Favourite lyric: “You’re a top ten kingpin in the borders of your hometown.”
27. The Luxury
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: According to a comment left on the website songmeanings.com, Downie had this to say about the song: “This is about a man who was sort of down on his luck. So he took to the streets shaking a banana at people, trying to convince them it was making a sound.” There are undertones of the fragile Quebec political situation, another underlying theme here.
Favourite lyric: “Prison-yard stares and fleur-de-lis tattoos. Cannibals are saving all their bones for soup.”
28. The Lonely End of the Rink
Album: World Container (2006)
Song notes: Drummer Johnny Fay explained the song in a 2007 interview with hipfans.com, saying when Gord Downie was growing up, he was a goaltender. “It can be a very lonely job if your team’s good,” Fay said, adding nevertheless,Downie maintains it’s not a hockey song.
Favourite lyric: “You drove me home through a snowy tomb, and I fell asleep in my seat.”
29. It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken
Album: In Violet Light (2002)
Song notes: The song takes its name from the graphic novel written by the singularly named Canadian author Seth. In the book he pays homage to Kalo, an 1940s cartoonist who’s been largely forgotten by the turn of the century. The phrase was used by a Hip staffer, Molly Lorimer, which brought it to the attention of the band, according to hipmuseum.com.
Favourite lyric: “When the colour of the night, and all the smoke in one life, gives way to shaky movements, improvisational skills, in the forest of whispering speakers.”
30. At Transformation
Album: Now for Plan A (2012)
Song notes: At Transformation is about Gord Downie’s struggle to support his wife Laura during her battle with cancer. He told the CBC the album and its songs were “me trying to help, mutely, in that way that a man around breast cancer tries hard to help.”
Favourite lyric: “I want to help you lift enormous things. A pinch, a sting, I don’t feel a thing.”
31. Three Pistols
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: The Hip’s ode to Group of Seven influencer, artist Tom Thompson, whose 1917 death on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park is the subject of conspiracy theories to this day, some saying he drowned, others believing he was murdered or committed suicide.
Favourite lyric: “He said, ‘Bring on the brand new renaissance, ‘cause I think I’m ready.”
32. Pigeon Camera
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: According to the website hipmuseum.com, the song developed after Downie performed an impromptu birthday song to road manager Dave Powell, who spent his childhood days in Thunder Bay. It evolved from there into a song about incest and spying.
Favourite lyric: “And that’s my sister, something we could no longer contain.”
33. Don’t Wake Daddy
Album: Trouble at the Henhouse (1996)
Song notes: A song infused with memories of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who in 1994 committed suicide at the height of his fame. Nirvana and the Tragically Hip once shared a bill at O’Cayz Corral in Madison, Wisc., where according to the hipmuseum.com, Gord Downie tried to introduce himself to Cobain, only to find him passed out in the back of the bar on a pool table. About 40 people were at the show.
Favourite lyric: “Kurt Cobain reincarnated, sighs and licks his face.”
34. Cordelia
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: In Shakespearian lore, Cordelia is the youngest and favourite daughter of mad King Lear, who won’t pay her father platitudes to prove her love and is banished for her behaviour.Her wicked sisters, Goneril and Regan, will say anything to get what they want. At the play’s end, Corelia returns to help her father, but he fails to recognize her in his madness until it’s too late.
Favourite lyric: “Tin can man, dragging from a car. Just to see how alive you really are.”
35. Springtime in Vienna
Album: Trouble at the Henhouse (1996)
Song notes: Introducing the song in 2009, Downie said, “It doesn’t remind me of a darker time at all.” Widely believed to be about the Nazi’s invasion of Austria in March 1938.
Favourite lyric: “We live to survive our paradoxes.”
36. Silver Jet
Album: In Violet Light (2002)
Song notes: The song’s first verse gives the album its name. Packed with 1940s references from the Second World War era, I interpret it as the story of a couple being pulled apart by war and the trepidation both feel about it.
Favourite lyric: "It’s quiet again, when a car like Big Ben, the radio dopplering, for all you Gregory Peck fans."
37. Heaven is a Better Place Today
Album: In Between Evolution (2004)
Song notes: The Hip’s tribute to Dan Snyder, the Atlanta Thrashers forward killed when teammate Dany Heatley crashed his Ferrari at high speed. The song also stands as a nod to Canadian soldiers fighting at the time in Iraq.
Favourite lyric: “Here’s a glue guy, a performance god.”
38. Grace Too
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes: To most, it’s a song about the solicitation of a prostitute, though others have different interpretations and the hipmuseum.com links it to film noire and the 1944 flick Double Indemnity. That same site says Grace, Too was a canoe belonging to a teacher of Gord Downie’s as a child.
Favourite lyric: “I come from downtown, born ready for you.”
39. Fiddler’s Green
Album: Road Apples (1991)
Song notes: According to mysendoff.com, Fiddler’s Green was an ode to Gord Downie’s five-year-old nephew, who died of a heart condition, written as a comfort to his sister left behind to grieve. In Irish legend, Fiddler’s Green was a mythical seafarer’s paradise, filled with endless grog and mirth.
Favourite lyric: “His tiny knotted heart, well I guess it never worked too good.”
40. Yer Not the Ocean
Album: World Container (2006)
Song notes: The video opens with a Vladimir Nabokov quote: “... for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of nature is the survival of the weakest.” The line ‘The Stranger in Myself’ could refer to a 2003 book, A Stranger to Myself, a haunting memoir of a German soldier on the Russian front in the Second World War.
Favourite lyric: "Again I'm talking to the lake, I'm standing on the rocks. You're not the ocean, I'm better to watch."
41. Inevitability of Death
Album: Day for Night (1994)
Song notes: Gord Downie told earofnewt.com it’s a “funny song more than anything,” it includes a shout-out to Terry Fox, and says it doesn’t matter what others think of you once you’re gone.
Favourite lyric: “We don’t go to hell, just our memories do.”
42. Queen of the Furrows
Album: We are the Same (2009)
Song notes: Queen of the Furrow is an agricultural title awarded by plowing associations in Canada. It’s a love song to a farm girl.
Favourite lyric: “This is how I feel, hens cluck and roosters crow.”
43. Goodnight Attawapiskat
Album: Now for Plan A (2012)
Song notes: The song’s roots grew from a concert the band played in Fort Albany, Ont., a First Nations community near Attawapiskat, where a housing crisis hit the national headlines in 2012. The lyrics take sharp aim at politicians and other well-wishers who roll into communities like Attawapiskat for photo ops, then disappear when the actual problem-solving needs to start.
Favourite lyric: “Hello! Good evening, folks. We are the Silver Poets, here in our thousand mile suits. We’re here to get paid.”
44. Last American Exit
Album: The Tragically Hip (EP) (1987)
Song notes: Written by Gord Sinclair and included on the band’s debut EP, Last American Exit is the narrator’s struggle of being in a band that’s getting more and more popular and his desire to return to simpler times.
Favourite lyric: “You know I’m tired of crawling behind my name among the crowd.”
45. I’ll Believe in You (Or I’ll Be Leaving You Tonight)
Album: Up to Here (1989)
Song notes: A song about a woman upset at her man, who she believes might be cheating on her, and the lengths she’s willing to go to exact revenge if he is.
Favourite lyric: “Ah, but desperate times call for desperate measures.”
46. In a World Possessed by the Human Mind
Album: Man Machine Poem (2016)
Song notes: A song whose origins likely arose in Gord Downie’s wife Laura’s battle with cancer, which he wrote about extensively in 2012, it's extended to his own struggles with the disease, which doctors say is untreatable and terminal.
Favourite lyric: “Quiet enough to hear God rustlin’ around in the bushes.”
47. Looking for a Place to Happen
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: It’s the Hip’s take, from the viewpoint of the Indigenous population of European explorers like Jacques Cartier, who is named in the song, crossing the ocean to explore the New World.
Favourite lyric: “It’s a shame to leave this masterpiece, with its gallery gods and its garbage bag trees.”
48. Fully Completely
Album: Fully Completely (1992)
Song notes: A classic Hip break-up song that provided the title for their seminal 1992 album.
Favourite lyric: “Bring me back in shackles, hang me long out in the sun.”
49. It Can’t be Nashville Every Night
Album: In Between Evolution (2004)
Song notes: According to hipmuseum.com, this was Gord Downie’s “anti-anthem,” a response to the Toby Keith’s of the world, who blindly followed the Bush White House at the time in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and used “misguided nationalism” to justify America’s response.
Favourite lyric: “He sang, ‘I’ll die before I quit.’”
50. Lake Fever
Album: Music at Work (2000)
Song notes: At a 2000 performance in Montreal, Gord Downie says, “It’s about a couple ... before they’re about to make love. He’s all intellectual saying, ‘On these very shores, just off these shores there were boats that weren’t allowed to dock 100 years ago because of cholera.’ He’s sort of saying ‘Would you like to hear a story or have sex?’”
Favourite lyric: “I’ll tell you a story about the lake fever or we can skip to the coital fury.”
