Category: CanCon

Lesser (Known) Lights #7

Trans-Canada Highwaymen – Explosive Hits Vol. 1

I’m always a bit surprised when fans of a band don’t follow former band members when they set out on new musical adventures. If someone has given you joy as part of one outfit, it only seems logical to me that they might be able to do it again with another. Barenaked Ladies have 2.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and I think we can all agree that a big chunk of those people (myself included) are mostly listening to music made when Steven Page was the band’s co-frontman. (I wonder if there is still some bad blood there, since you would never know from the band’s Spotify bio that he was ever one of them.) Page on his own, however, has just over 5,500 listeners, and Trans-Canada Highwaymen – his supergroup with Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness, Craig Northey of Odds and Chris Murphy of Sloan – has a mere 3,115 at this writing. And in the case of the latter at least, that means a whole lot of people are missing out on a giant heap of fun.

Now, even the idea of a Canadian supergroup seems pretty un-Canadian to me. Considering the gang’s middling commercial success, they’ll have to do until Drake, The Weeknd and Bieber join forces with whoever they pick to play George. (Sorry, Biebs fans – he’s Ringo in this scenario.) Mendes? Avril? Shania? Buble? My pick is Celine, medical concerns permitting – I’m pretty sure the album would be an unlistenable mess, but what a glorious mess it would be.

This album is wall-to-wall joy, starting with the throwback cover art in homage to those messily bright K-tel collections of the band members’ (and every other Canadian of the era) childhoods. After an entertaining opening track setting out a possibly fake story about how the band even exists, we get nothing but cover versions (my kryponite!) of classic Canadian pop songs of the 1960s and (mostly) 1970s. Part of the fun – assuming you share my definition of that word – was learning about the songs that were unfamiliar to me. But there was plenty I already knew here – many of them from those same K-tel collections – and hearing them in these faithful renditions was both nostalgic and revelatory. I never cared for Lighthouse’s “Pretty Lady”, but something about Berg’s clogged sinus delivery opened me up to its charms. Joni Mitchell’s “Raised on Robbery” is a honky tonk roof raiser, the cheese of Paul Anka’s “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” becomes less of a threat to your cholesterol level, and I apologise to Larry Evoy and the rest of Edward Bear for not recognizing that “You, Me and Mexico” is, indeed, a classic. And if they hadn’t already won me over completely, they sealed the deal with a high energy and not even slightly ironic take on “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” by, in the words of Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs”, “Little Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco family”.

I haven’t had the chance to see them live yet, but I really hope their calendar and mine will align while they still feel like doing this. In concert, the band liberally mixes in tracks from their past bands, and any show where the setlist might include “Brian Wilson”, “She’s So Young”, “The Rest of My Life” and, especially, “Heterosexual Man” is a night that I’ll happily take a chance on. You should, too.

Canada’s Greatest Song?

Growing up – and, really, still pretty much to this day – I never found Canadian history to be all that interesting, and certainly not in comparison to our neighbours directly to the south. The American Revolution was a lot more dramatic than our polite – and oh so Canadian – advance to nationhood. Their Civil War had much higher stakes than our endless battles over Quebecois sovereignty, and the Quiet Revolution was a tempest in a teapot when compared to the horrors inflicted on Blacks before and during the civil rights movement. (Hopefully, today’s students are being educated in a way that I wasn’t about the awful shit we did to Indigenous peoples.) American history was “Roots”, while Canadian history was “The Last Spike”: definitely important, but not very dramatic.

I don’t know much about Craig Baird, but he is doing God’s work over at Canadian History Ehx in promoting our country and its vast and fascinating history. I haven’t checked out his podcast yet, but he is a prodigious tweeter, and I have learned a lot about Canada and Canadians from following him. 

In recent months, Baird ran a poll over at Twitter (no, I will not use the current name) to pick Canada’s Greatest Song. It started out covering a remarkably broad swath of CanCon. In addition to all the names you would expect to see, there were multiple tracks from Indigenous and Québécois artists, children’s entertainers like Raffi went up against rock icons, and our nation’s hip hop community was well (if incompletely) represented. Delights from bands that many barely remember, like The Kings, were put up for a vote, as was at least one act I didn’t know were Canadian (The Four Lads). “I’m Just Ken” made the cut, and even Bieber got a (begrudgingly deserved) shot.

Where we ended up was, unfortunately, kind of sad. The final 16 tunes included four tracks each from the Tragically Hip and Neil Young and three from Gordon Lightfoot. Worthies all, but not exactly a true reflection of our cultural mosaic. They were joined by (almost) exclusively other white men: Bryan Adams, Leonard Cohen, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Barenaked Ladies and Spirit of the West. Only Connors and Spirit of the West (with its one female member) could be considered surprises. Where were the women? No Joni, Celine or Shania. How about people of colour? No Drake or The Weeknd. What about someone under 30 years old, like Shawn Mendes or Alessia Cara? Nope, none of them either.

It got even less diverse by the semi-finals, where two Lightfoot tunes defeated a pair of tracks from the Hip. And then came the final, where Gordon’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” took down his “If You Could Read My Mind” to take the crown. I can’t argue with the final result: outside of his own “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, there may not be a more Canadian song than Lightfoot’s ballad of remembrance of the crew of the ill-fated Great Lakes bulk carrier. But it would have been a lot more satisfying to see him take down some sort of popular dreck, like “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, or an unexpected wild card, like 54-40’s “I Go Blind”, Stan Rogers’ “Barrett’s Privateers” or Maestro Fresh Wes’ “Let Your Backbone Slide”. Alas, it was not to be.

Despite the result – which seemed pretty much guaranteed early in the process – it was fun to follow along and vote every day. And while many of my favourites fell away early, it was great to see them included. It was also a delight to see the surprising (to me at least) support for tunes like Stompin’ Tom’s “The Hockey Song” and “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate” by Arrogant Worms, as well as some of my favourite homegrown acts like Hot Hot Heat, Matthew Good Band and Carly Rae Jepson. So, while what we ended up with was rather narrow – Craig’s following is definitely a lot of folks who look like me, even if our musical tastes don’t line up very well – the overall field of songs that began the process shows how much great and diverse music has been produced by this country’s artists. (You can check for yourself on this playlist.) I hope Craig does this again in a few years – with some tweaks to the voting process that will create a more diverse final field, as he has acknowledged is necessary. I will definitely be nominating “Jealous of Your Cigarette” by Hawksley Workman or Rich Aucoin’s “It” (or both if permitted) – and probably still rooting for “I’m Just Ken” to triumph.