The Never-Ending Playlist 1. The biggest hits

This is the first of several playlists that can function as an unofficial soundtrack to my book, The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, published by ECW Press in April 2018. The first two playlists feature 40 Hip tracks each: one set of greatest hits for newcomers (or a refresher for lapsed fans), one of deep(er) cuts and less obvious selections. Later we’ll feature Gord Downie solo tracks, influences, peers, and more.

The Never-Ending Present Playlist #1: The biggest hits

Spotify link is here.
Tidal link is here. 

1.  “Blow at High Dough.” The first song on the first album was many people’s first impression of the band. “They shot a movie once in my hometown”: this is clearly a once-in-a-lifetime event in the locale, long before Canada became a popular and economical place for U.S. studios to shoot films. “Down at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing”: Hollywood vs. the hayseeds; the big time and the small potatoes. And then, before our ears, with a suspended stop and one ringing power chord—a moment filled with the tension of a cliff diver right before he makes an impact—this bar band from a tiny Ontario city transforms into stadium-worthy status alongside AC/DC. Rob Baker once said that his favourite part of any Hip show was during this song, when the whole band kicks in after the opening. He’s not alone.

2.   “Small Town Bringdown.” The first Hip song I ever heard (on Q107 in Toronto), the first song on the EP, the first single released to radio. This is also the song Bruce Dickinson heard in his New York City kitchen, when he played a sampler CD for an upcoming music conference and decided he had to see this band and sign them to MCA Records.

3.   “Last American Exit.” How could we tell this band was Canadian? “I’m on the last American exit to the north land … to my homeland.”

4.   “38 Years Old.” An entirely fictional story set during a very real event, the biggest prison break in Canadian history, which took place 10 miles away from Downie’s childhood home in Amherstview. “It was pretty exciting at the time,” he said, “the biggest thing to ever happen where nothing ever happens.” It was 1972; he was eight years old, with an older brother named Mike and two older sisters, but that’s where the real-life parallels end. Though a fan favourite, this was left off set lists for years.

5.   “New Orleans is Sinking.” The first of many Downie songs about death in the water. Based on a guitar riff from Them’s version of “Baby Please Don’t Go,” this was played at almost every Tragically Hip show since it was written. Often, a jam in the middle would be a place to workshop new material, including some of the band’s biggest hits, like “Ahead By a Century.”

6.   “Boots or Hearts.” This longtime favourite was the first song of the first show, in Victoria, of the Man Machine Poem tour in 2016. “When things fall apart, man, they really fall apart.” Except they didn’t.

7.   “Little Bones.” Written in New Orleans while recording Road Apples, where it was humid and “so sticky” that Downie needed to “butter [his] cue finger up” to play billiards in the converted mansion where the band was recording. Upon arriving in the city, a cab driver recommended a local eatery with advice, “Eat that chicken slow, don’t worry about them little bones.” Downie was reading Timothy Findley’s Last of the Crazy People at the time, in which there is a cat named Little Bones. This wonderfully surreal set of images culminates in a chorus that mutates on a different series of puns each time, all set to one of the band’s greatest rock riffs.

8.   “Three Pistols.” This song was left off Up to Here; it wasn’t deemed strong enough. Which seems shocking, though demos from the time validate the decision. After another couple of years playing it on the road, it had morphed into another one of the band’s barn-burners, with a lyric referencing Tom Thomson—again, death in the water is a theme, as is a missing icon (see: Bill Barilko).

9.   “Fiddler’s Green.” Written after the death of Downie’s five-year-old nephew from a congenital heart condition, this was left off set lists for years, despite being an acoustic campfire favourite among Hip fans. It returned around 2006, and was on the set list at the last show, where Downie dedicated it to his sister, who was in the audience.

10.  “Fifty-Mission Cap.” The only non-novelty hockey song to ever make the Top 40, this song about the mysterious disappearance of Bill Barilko came out in the fall of 1992, when the Toronto Maple Leafs were considered a Stanley Cup contender for the first time in decades (spoiler: they didn’t make it). By sheer coincidence, the Leafs were also retiring Barilko’s sweater that year; plans to do so in April ’92 were delayed by a players strike, so it was bumped to October—11 days after Fully Completely was released.

11.  “Locked in the Trunk of a Car.” This lyric sprung from a short film Downie worked on at Queen’s as well as a narrative captured on a live version of “Highway Girl.” Mixed in with a bit of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Downie claimed it was actually a metaphor for a relationship. But it made a lot of people—including Downie—feel queasy, despite being one of the band’s biggest hits. It rarely made set lists in later years.

12. “Wheat Kings.” This song is ostensibly about the wrongful conviction case of David Milgaard, but you wouldn’t know that from the lyrics, which are characteristically opaque for Downie. Either way, it’s full of some of his strongest images, and is the one Hip song you’re most likely to hear at a Canadian campfire. Even the loons join in.

13. “Grace, Too.” A mid-tempo boom-bap beat, a melodic bass riff, and layers of guitars that suggest they’re building up to something, but never do—which is the point, in tune with the unresolved narrative in the lyric about the plotting of a crime. Baker’s guitar never takes the lead exactly, but it starts off like a mist and gets increasingly dense with richer textures until he’s conjuring snow squalls. By the time the song ends, he’s making whale music. Considering it’s one of the Hip’s most popular and enduring songs, “Grace, Too” is remarkable for what it isn’t, rather than what it is.

14. “Nautical Disaster.” Again, unlikely hit-single material: an endlessly circular chord progression with linear lyrics that never repeat, with neither a chorus nor even a single rhyme. So many lines are bone-chilling, starting with the opening stanza, with the “screaming that filled my head all day.” Downie thought the song was haunted: he found an early notebook with “endless drafts of it—endless, but they don’t really change.” If he ever got remotely distracted while performing it, “the song may as well end.”

15.  “So Hard Done By.” “Interesting and sophisticated / refusing to be celebrated.” This song was recorded as a rote rocker for Fully Completely, and wisely rejected. By the time they got to New Orleans to record Day For Night, it became sultry and slinky, an album highlight.

16. “Gift Shop.” Like “Grace, Too,” this is ostensibly a song where nothing much happens—and again, that’s the point, this time for an otherworldly, out-of-body lyric. Unlike “Grace, Too,” this song has a catchy bap-ba-da-da chorus, and some haunting Hammond organ. Baker’s guitar was recorded in a barn in -40° C. “That’s what really cold air sounds like,” mixer Steven Drake told me.

17.  “Springtime in Vienna.” In later years, Downie said this was his favourite Tragically Hip song in the band’s entire discography. It’s hard to imagine a more succinct single line than, “We live to survive our paradoxes.”

18. “Ahead by a Century.” You may have heard this one before. I hear it every week when it’s played in the hallways of my child’s school, right before the Indigenous land acknowledgement and the national anthem. Fitting.

19. “Bobcaygeon.” Just because Downie drops the loaded term “Aryan” into the bridge of this song doesn’t mean it’s about a 1933 Nazi riot in Toronto, as is widely assumed (Downie never talked about the lyric in public): there were plenty of neo-Nazi incidents and police riots in Toronto in the 1990s, from which the narrator of this song is escaping when he heads to his lover’s place in cottage country. This is one of only a handful of Hip songs Downie ever performed in a solo set. “It’s my song, I wrote it,” he told one collaborator.

20. “Poets.” This tongue-in-cheek send-up of popular perceptions of poetry also happens to be perhaps the most ridiculous set of lyrics Downie ever wrote—as anyone who’s ever covered it or sang it at karaoke can tell you. It’s also the grooviest rock song they wrote post-Road Apples, one in which their Stones influence came right to the forefront.

21. “Fireworks.” This is one of the Hip’s greatest rock songs in a pop format, as opposed to blues-based numbers that defined their work up to this point. There’s a classic riff with a boogaloo push, with hints of the Romantics’ new wave hit “What I Like About You” and the Who’s “I Can’t Explain.” Contrary to popular belief, and from what you would infer from the opening line, this is not a song about hockey, but about marriage.

22.  “My Music at Work.” This title was borrowed from an ad campaign at a Toronto easy-listening station, EZ Rock. The station’s general manager, Marc Paris, told journalist Marc Weisblott, “We figured it would be a good idea to promote the station as something to listen to from nine-to-five. As a way of life.” Talking about a song with the lyric about avoiding trends and clichés, Paris went on to admit, with no apparent sense of irony, “We thought about having some fun with [the song ‘My Music at Work’] during our morning show. Then we decided against it. There is a phobia that our audience will tune out any fads. [“Avoid trends and cliché,” sings Downie.] We wouldn't want to compel them to go away and start listening somewhere else, and [playing the song] would mean introducing something to the audience they don't know. We don't want to do that. Weird we are not.”

23. “Putting Down.” “There’s reasons for the road, I guess / to document the Indigenous.” Huh.

24. “Lake Fever.” One of the Hip’s rare forays into smooth adult pop, this song has aged considerably better than its initial reception would suggest.

25.  “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken.” This was a band who always led with a rocker. That this was chosen as the first single from In Violet Light was an unusual move at the time: it’s a ballad, it’s moody, it’s weird, the title is extremely long. But it was not only the catchiest song on the album, it was also one of the band’s greatest lyrical and musical triumphs, and a song many returned to during the fateful summer of 2016.

26. “The Darkest One.” This song got more attention that it might have from radio thanks to a video featuring Don Cherry and the Trailer Park Boys.

27.  “Silver Jet.” A man with many Gords and Cheryls in his audience penned this priceless gem: “There's a still in the night, a tuneless moonlight /
Just the I-need-you-and-here's-whys of snoring Gords and Cheryls.”

28. “At the Hundredth Meridian” (live). Confession: I’ve always hated the Fully Completely version of this song, which sounded like tuneless, flaccid funk best left in the ashes of the ’90s. But live, it was always a jam. By 2004, when the Hip recorded That Night in Toronto, it was monstrous. (Another confession: I don’t think anything from 2004’s In Between Evolution is worth including on this playlist. Fight me.)

29. “Yer Not the Ocean.” Yes, Bob Rock polished this band, bringing out their melodic side and more musical complexity. But with results like this, why argue?

30.  “The Lonely End of the Rink.” A crushing riff, a reggae lilt to the verses and a ska bridge, a soaring lead guitar, and an incredibly personal lyric from Downie—written about his father, Edgar—adds up to one of the most underrated singles in the Hip’s canon, and certainly the most musically diverse inside a single song. The story behind this song is one of the most beautiful in the book, bringing tears to the eyes of this non-hockey-playing writer every time.

31.  “In View.” Hip purists hated this perfect pop song—what’s with that plinky toy piano and synth riff?—but it gave the Hip one of only three No. 1 singles of their career. “That song keeps giving you more and more,” one of their peers told me. “It has four choruses. I’ve listened to that song with musicians while in a van on tour, and I’d say, ‘No, wait! There are two more more choruses that are going to hit.’ It doesn’t stop, it’s so good.”

32.  “Love is a First.” A bass line from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” A Johnny Marr guitar riff. A solo that sounds like Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. What’s going on here? Who cares? It totally works. It also gave the Hip one of their last radio hits.

33. “Coffee Girl.” Another much-maligned single, primarily because it doesn’t sound like anything most people expect the Hip to do, with its hip-hop drum beat, its Herb Alpert-esque trumpet solo and the surprisingly non-creepy image of a middle-aged man observing a young barista. Belongs on a mix tape with “Cat Power and classic Beck.”

34.  “Morning Moon.” Another outlier: a somewhat straightforward country song, perhaps the only time Gord Sinclair played a root-fifth bass pattern in the Hip. The lyric deals with both a partner’s anxiety and the economics of environmental destruction (“When something’s too cheap, someone’s paying something”). Seek out the version Sarah Harmer performed on CBC Radio’s Q.

35. “Now For Plan A.” Speaking of Harmer, she appears in the video and sings harmony on this gorgeous ballad, the Hip’s greatest since “It’s a Good Life.” That it took the old friends this long to collaborate on a Hip album is kind of shocking.

36. “At Transformation.” When it was revealed that Downie’s wife had struggled with and beat breast cancer, it was assumed this was one of the songs that addressed it: “I want to help you lift enormous things.” In fact, this debuted at the Bobcaygeon show two months before she was diagnosed.

37. “Streets Ahead.” For all their musical progression, the Hip were still capable of bashing out a quick rocker reminiscent of their earliest days.

38. “In a World Possessed By the Human Mind.” “Just give me the news.” That was the first lyric of the first single released after fans found out about Downie’s diagnosis. Thankfully, the strength of this song signalled that this band wasn’t going out with a whimper. It was a good omen: Man Machine Poem was their best-reviewed album in almost 20 years.

39.  “Tired as Fuck.” Rob Baker’s jazz influence rarely came to the fore in the Hip, other than some early, never-recorded songs and some later B-sides—and here, the most unlikely single the Hip ever released to radio.

40. “Machine.” The last song on the last Hip album (to date) is epic and soaring, and should have become a live staple had fate not intervened.