There’s a song of camaraderie for his Tragically Hip bandmates (Love Over Money), a song about rocking a baby to sleep (Bedtime), and even a song that seems to be about the loyalty of a dog (Faith Faith).Īs with Secret Path, the album dispels myth-making in favour of human-making. Introduce Yerself is the sound of a man who, when faced with imminent death, chose to keep on doing the thing he loved most and leave a final tribute to the ones who mattered to him. Imagine if they were part of us and we them – like, how incredibly cool it would make us? That’s what’s missing as we celebrate doughnuts and hockey over and over and over and over again.” But the new 150 years can be years of building an actual nation. Regarding Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people, he told the CBC last year, “The last 150 years aren’t as much worth celebrating as we think. Such was the nature of Downie’s patriotism: he honoured Canada in his lyrics but bravely used his remaining strength to remind us of some of the most shameful moments in our history. Then came solo concept album Secret Path, inspired by a tragic true story of Chanie Wenjack, who escaped from a residential school and died trying to walk back home. But he persevered night after night and gave fans a chance to participate in cathartic communal grieving. He appeared frail, his movements uncharacteristically subdued, and he used a teleprompter to help with forgotten lyrics. In 2016, he embarked on an emotional final tour with the Hip. Introduce Yerself follows a remarkably prolific period. Downie and his collaborators, including Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, captured the 23 songs in a matter of days, and every cut is a tribute to someone in the singer’s life. The bulk of it was recorded in January 2016, mere weeks after his diagnosis the rest was finished in February 2017 after he had already been living with cancer for a year. On Friday (October 27), Downie posthumously releases his final solo album, Introduce Yerself (Arts & Crafts). Instead, he used his final two years to leave a new legacy, one that, in a lot of ways, complicates and rewrites the old one.
But Downie wasn’t ready to let his 20-year legacy speak for itself. That was the one Canadian singer Gord Downie received in December of 2015, soon after his band, the Tragically Hip, finished their album Man Machine Poem.įor nearly anyone else, this would have been cause to retreat from the spotlight. It’s hard to imagine a less hopeful diagnosis than glioblastoma, an aggressive and incurable brain cancer that carries a life expectancy of slightly over a year.
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