The Never-Ending Playlist 2: Deep(er) cuts

The Hip didn’t release many rarities, and frankly, they weren’t that good when they did. So there are no obscurities here, though it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever hear any of these album cuts on the radio. If you know the hits backwards and forwards, then start here.

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Tidal link here.

1. “All-Canadian Surf Club.” “I got my guitar, Cadillac / Some chick and twenty-four cold beers.” To fully appreciate Gord Downie’s evolution as a lyricist, it’s important to learn that he started at the bottom like a bargain-basement Springsteen rip-off just like every rock’n’roller of his generation. There’s hope for all of us!

2. “Evelyn.” A Gord Sinclair song, supposedly based on the Clint Eastwood movie Play Misty For Me, about a radio DJ stalked by a woman named, yes, Evelyn. Word has it this was one of the band’s very first originals, the only one of the first crop to make it all the way to the EP.

3. “Trickle Down.” Can you tell they started out as essentially a Stones cover band? A great one, by the sounds of it. If their debut album only consisted of songs like this, they’d be off to a solid start. But there was so much more. “All the drinks are on the Crown” is sung by a guy who played more than a few dive bars where people spent their EI and welfare cheques on liquid therapy, bars where “skeletons come to dance.”

4. “I’ll Believe in You.” Spousal abuse was not a popular topic in rock songs of the 1980s—or ever. Along with “She Didn’t Know” and to a lesser degree “38 Years Old,” the Hip sang about vengeance for violence against women.

5. “Another Midnight.” Listen to the first eight bars of this song: is it the Skydiggers? Blue Rodeo? Crash Vegas? Weeping Tile? 54.40? I can’t tell. For all their unique qualities, the Hip most definitely fit into a time and place in Canadian music. Not that that’s a bad thing—at all.

6. “Opiated.” For all the fist-pumping glory that is most of Up To Here, darker tracks like this one pointed to a more diverse path in the future.

7. “The Luxury.” The jazziest this band sounded until “Tired as Fuck” on the final album. In 2016, the Toronto show I saw opened with this track: “So consumed with the shape I’m in / Can’t enjoy the luxury.”

8. “Long Time Running.” A 6/8 ballad with a guitar that owes a debt to Pops Staples, this not only provided the title to the excellent 2017 documentary, but it contains a line that sums up this bond between brothers: “You work me against my friends, and you’ll get left out in the cold.”

9. “The Last of the Unplucked Gems.” I always enjoyed this two-minute psychedelic drone, but considered it a bit of a trifle. Gord Downie told me he considered this a watershed moment in the evolution of the band’s songwriting, and possibly his favourite song on Road Apples. When I started going to see Hip cover bands while researching the book, I was pleasantly surprised to find out what a popular favourite this is. And Ian Blurton melted my face off when he performed it at the Toronto book launch.

 

10. “Pigeon Camera.” Based on a guitar riff by Johnny Fay, this is a natural extension from “Unplucked Gems.” The atmospheres conjured perfectly match the image of history’s original drone, soaring over enemy territory. It also features a weird Doppler effect at the end of the bridge; producer Chris Tsangarides explains it in detail in the book. What this song is actually about, however, some kind of dark family secret, has long been the source of speculation.

11. “The Wherewithal.” I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like the Hip’s most popular album, but the band themselves admit, in the liner notes to the deluxe reissue, that some of the songs suffered in the studio—including this one. Rob Baker wanted a do-over. The reissue includes a bonus live disc of a Horseshoe Tavern show recorded right before the album came out; this version is from that.

12. “Fully Completely.” I never liked this song until I saw it performed live, where the lockstep rhythm section blew me away, and the double-time guitar gear-shift toward the end launched the song into overdrive. The difference in tempo between the studio version and any live version ever is remarkable.

13. “Fire in the Hole.” This was the first song from Day For Night I heard on the airwaves, and I couldn’t believe that this is what they released to radio. It sounded raw, unhinged, with snarling guitars, and a sinister Downie screaming in ways I’d never heard before on a studio recording. I didn’t know Hazel Dickens at the time, but I certainly got the Riefenstahl reference, and it all adds up to one of the most harrowing songs in the entire discography.

14. “Scared.” Always loved this song, but loved it even more when Kate Fenner and Chris Brown covered it at the 2001 book launch for Have Not Been the Same. This was a devastating one to hear on the 2016 tour: “Do I make you scared? That’s kinda what I do.”

15. “Titanic Terrarium.” Downie told me that this was one of his favourite of his own lyrics. Who am I to disagree? Obviously influenced by the environmental activism he witnessed after touring with Midnight Oil, this is about as explicitly political as Downie would ever get—which is to say, still poetically vague. I always thought there was some kind of detuned banjo on this track; co-producer Mark Howard said it’s a guitar pedal effect. This and “Nautical Disaster” were two Day For Night tracks plucked from the original demos recorded in their Kingston rehearsal space. Julie Doiron did a great version of this for Strombo’s Hip 30.

16. “Flamenco.” Is there a single Downie lyric as disarming as, “Maybe a prostitute could teach you how to take a compliment”? This is also a stunning melody, which has since been blessed by the gifts of (at least that I know of) Kate Fenner, Leslie Feist and Michelle McAdorey.

17. “Don’t Wake Daddy.” I used to hate this song. I kept waiting for something to happen. I wanted Johnny Fay to do something interesting. I thought the chorus was deadly dull. I didn’t love the lyric, and the Kurt Cobain reference seemed cheap and distracting. Over time, however, I grew to appreciate the droning, bluesy trance that underscores the lyric about what you can get away with while careful not to disrupt the sleeping patriarch. The last line is also exquisite: “Sing to end all songs.”

18. “Put It Off.” “Words cannot touch beauty.” That’s the kind of thing you would expect a new parent to write “on the day that you were born.” The rest of the song, however, finds said parent doing a lot of strange things (“I made degenerate art for the religious right”) as a way to self-sabotage the most beautiful day of his life.

19. “Thompson Girl.” Phantom Power is the last Tragically Hip album that everyone could agree on (it’s also the only one the band featured on every night of the final tour), and songs like this are the reason why. Producer Steve Berlin helped rip apart what might have been just an average rock song and turned it into a stomping acoustic number with mandolin and fuzzy bass. Downie, under the influence of Sarah Harmer and Ron Sexsmith, delivers one of his greatest melodies, and the chorus sums up the challenge of staying on his game a decade into his recording career: “Grunt work somewhere between dream and duty / Poking through with all them shoots of beauty.”

20. “Escape is at Hand for the Travelling Man.” This is perfection. The rhythm section echoes the German kosmische musik of Neu’s “Hallo Gallo,” intentionally or not. The guitar interplay is sublime, as is Paul Langlois’s harmony with Downie. The lyric strikes a chord with every touring musician. Like “Grace, Too,” it doesn’t necessarily build up to anything; it’s not supposed to. It just is. It exists in the never-ending present.

21. “Emperor Penguin.” One of the most wonderfully weird songs about co-parenting ever written. Wait, are there any other weird songs about co-parenting? David Bowie’s “Kooks”?

22. “Tiger the Lion.” One of the most divisive Hip songs, in which Downie riffs on John Cage theories while the band grinds over a loping Black Sabbath riff and Chris Brown literally crawls inside a piano. At first I loved the lyric but hated the music; over time I grew to love the friction between the two. But if this track drives you up the wall, you are most definitely not alone. Sequencing it immediately after album opener “My Music At Work”—perhaps their poppiest rock song ever—won it even more enemies, and foreshadowed the fact that the rest of that album was not going to go the way you thought it might.

23. “Stay.” On the flip side of “Tiger the Lion,” we have this gem of a pop song. I have some theories about its subject. I’ll tell you off the record.

24. “As I Wind Down the Pines.” What I’d give to have heard this band make an all-acoustic album, because what Baker and Langlois do together on tracks like this is magical. Hearing how Chris Brown’s piano and Julie Doiron’s harmonies add even more beautiful colours here makes one wonder why this band was so musically conservative most of the time. It also provides a direct line to what Downie would do on Coke Machine Glow.

25. “Throwing Off Glass.” I have too much to say about this song. But let’s just say that as someone who didn’t really give In Violet Light the time of day when it came out, I was ignorant of this track’s infinite charms until I started writing the book. Every single member of the Hip is at the top of their game here. It’s now one of my favourite songs of all time, by anyone.

26. “A Beautiful Thing.” This was a haunting one to hear in 2016, with the line about getting a middle-of-the-night phone call. “ ‘You better be dying’—and you were … It’d be a beautiful thing to see that beautiful thing continuing.”

27. “The Dire Wolf.” Downie has a lot of death-by-water songs. This one is inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem and, some believe, based on the tale of a Newfoundland woman who rescued shipwreck survivors.

28. “As Makeshift As We Are.” Honestly, In Between Evolution is my least favourite Hip album, to the point of being unlistenable. But I’ll nod to it here, only through the follow-up live album.

29. “Family Band.” I fucking love this song, and cannot believe that it was not a huge late-career hit. Yes, it sounds like Broken Social Scene covering the Ramones, but goddam it’s a great riff, and perhaps Downie’s best-ever self-reflexive song about being in a rock band. Can’t help but feel there’s a Constantines influence here as well. TURN IT UP.

30. “Fly.” Who’s been taking vocal lessons? The guy who references Freddie Mercury in the lyric here.

31. “Luv (sic).” This is why you hire Bob Rock. Guitars, bass, drums all sound huge, though not, as many feared, in a Metallica way. For whatever reason, the Rock records also find Baker sounding more like the Edge than he had before or since. As a copy editor, I also thoroughly appreciate this song’s punny title.

32. “The Last Recluse.” It’s the song that opens and closes with what sounds like a pipe organ, has some lovely accordion work in the middle, and prominently features what sounds like a choir of male opera singers. No wonder so many Hip fans hated this record. I love it.

33. “The Depression Suite.” Three great songs for the price of one! What if this song does nothing? In fact, it does a hell of a lot. Don’t you want to see how it ends? Full points for the non-sappy string section, arranged by the guy who did the incredibly sappy early ’80s CanCon hit “Letting Go” by Straight Lines (which I also like, so question my judgment if you will). 

34. “Speed River.” I used to live in Guelph, so I have a soft spot for this song, even though Downie recycled much of the melody for 2010’s superior “The East Wind.” This is a solid mid-tempo, Tom Petty-ish rock song that, if you heard it in 1991, sounds exactly like you thought this band might grow up to be. Thankfully, they also became much more.

35. “About This Map.” The most majestic song about a midlife marital crisis. “There’s got to be more than just to despair.”

36. “Man Machine Poem.” I wrote off Now For Plan A when it came out. Being a huge fan of the 2016 album that borrowed this song’s title, I can see now that the 2012 album was a logical bridge between the Bob Rock years and the ways in which Kevin Drew and Dave Hamelin busted open the band’s sound for what would be their final record. Perhaps not coincidentally, this song makes it most evident.

37. “We Want to Be It.” When Downie went public with news of his wife’s breast cancer, people thought this song’s chorus (“drip, drip, drip”) was about chemotherapy. In fact, it was written before her diagnosis—which only makes the image all that more enigmatic. It doesn’t have anything to do with the title, which Downie lifted from Alan Arkin’s excellent memoir (I tell this story in the book).

38. “Man.” This is not the Tragically Hip you thought you were getting. Their final album opened with a studio experiment, an extended jam coming out of the track they placed at the end of the record, “Machine.” It’s big, bold, beautiful and sparse, indicating that just about anything could happen. That explosion you here at the end is the detonation of any expectations.

39. “What Blue.” Written and recorded in one day, after Kevin Drew asked Paul Langlois about a guitar riff he was noodling with. For a band whose work of at least the last decade sounded a bit belaboured, this was a good sign.

40. “Ocean Next.” A lilting 6/8 ballad, the first time they’d written a song remotely like this since “Long Time Running”—and this one is a lot weirder, starting with the fact that the verses are in the more unconventional 8/8 and Downie sounds like he’s singing underwater. “You think, you stink,” sings Downie, quoting the philosophy of spontaneity that drove Neil Young’s producer, David Briggs. This album was the first time since Day For Night that the Tragically Hip felt confident enough in their weirdest impluses to indulge happy accidents. No wonder it turned out to be one of their best albums, leaving a big “what if?” attached to the tragedy that befell them as soon as they finished it.