Tag: Gordon Lightfoot

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.

Favourite “New” Music – April 2023

I would never call myself a fan of Gordon Lightfoot, and I don’t have a story connecting me to one of his songs, because none of them ever played a part in a significant moment in my life. But they were always there, part of the CanCon 30% coming through my radio speaker, and I guess that means I took him for granted. That, of course, was a mistake.

My friend Alan Sutherland did not take him for granted: for our major English paper in Grade 12, he wanted to write about Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. I should have taken that as a cue to listen more carefully, but overall I wasn’t giving Alan’s musical loves enough respect: it took me 40 years after all to clue in to the genius that was Ritchie Blackmore. At least I developed some appreciation for Lightfoot at a less leisurely pace.

I always liked “Sundown” (which my wife intensely dislikes) and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. I hated “If You Could Read My Mind” – my “Sundown” – and that was not helped by the dance version cover. But in recent years, it’s grown on me considerably, and I sort of love its grandiose (“In a castle dark or a fortress strong / With chains upon my feet”) expressions of love and heartbreak. If you just let yourself wallow in it, I’m pretty sure you’d end up babbling in the corner.

Lightfoot never seemed cool, but that was only because he was cool in that understated Canadian way: he was so cool that you never saw it happening. (His former neighbour Aubrey should’ve been paying closer attention.) He was a songwriter’s songwriter, and greats like Dylan and Prine respected his craft. His time at the forefront of pop culture – to the extent he ever was there – was over before 1980, but we never stopped hearing his old hits on the radio. He continued to write and record and perform, invulnerable to trends, still his own unique artist. His importance in Canadian culture never really dimmed even though the hits stopped coming: he remained to the end one of those artists who sort of defined the country. And though the music lives on, it feels wrong that he won’t be here anymore to perform it.

I didn’t listen to any Lightfoot in April, but here are some other records that I did love last month.

  • Tom Verlaine – Tom Verlaine (1979)
  • Wipers – Is This Real? (1980)
  • Slint – Spiderland (1991) (The soundtrack to the gloomiest Thursday afternoon you ever spent, this is bourbon-soaked shoegaze that burrows deep and drags you along in its melancholy wake.)
  • Material Issue – International Pop Overthrow (1991)
  • Tricky – Maxinquaye (1995)
  • The Dollyrots – Eat My Heart Out (2004)
  • Kid Confucius – Kid Confucius (2005)
  • Go Betty Go – Nothing Is More (2005)
  • Nerf Herder – Rockingham (2016) (These guys, like Bowling for Soup below, make me smile, and that’s more than enough – the high energy and bouncy tunes are a bonus.)
  • Pkew Pkew Pkew – Pkew Pkew Pkew (2016) (Canadian punks, including an ode to predrinking.)
  • Bowling for Soup – Drunk Dynasty (2016)
  • The Pretty Flowers – Golden Beat Sessions (2019) (They do such a great job of making these songs personal, it took four tracks before I realized that every cut was a cover.)
  • The Allergies – Say the Word (2020)
  • Mo Troper – Natural Beauty (2020)
  • The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022)
  • cheerbleederz – even in jest (2022)
  • The Greeting Committee – Dandelion (2022)
  • Dumb – Pray 4 Tomorrow (2022)
  • Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness – Tilt At The Wind No More (2023) (Catchy pop melodies with theatrical flair and emo bent.)
  • 100 gecs – 10,000 gecs (2023) (Delightfully odd and oddly delightful, their sound is messy and overstuffed, but with a keen melodic awareness)