7/29/2023 0 Comments Gord downie![]() “He was working on what was loosely a book although, in classic Gord fashion, there was a spin on it that was unique. But, as the lights faded and the calendar ticked over to a new winter in 2017, his plan to perhaps pen a book before his eroding memory and mental capacities gave out was proving unfulfilling. Gord had busied himself though the winter immediately following his diagnosis in late 2015 by penning the 23 heartfelt farewell letters to loved ones, Lake Ontario and the Boston Bruins that would become Introduce Yerself – an emotional deluge of a double-album that younger brother Patrick Downie views in hindsight as “kind of the ‘freakout’” – well before the nationwide mania over The Tragically Hip’s unspoken “farewell” tour and the Secret Path phenomenon took over. The downtime after this period of furious activity was, in reality, somewhat darker. If you happened to catch one of the shattering Secret Path shows he subsequently performed in Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax that fall, you’d be forgiven for thinking Gord Downie might actually be that one superhuman being able to draw sufficient strength from his commitment to his art and his music and his message to defy the odds stacked against him. Recorded in 2013 but set aside for just the right moment of impact, it was released in October of 2016 along with a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire and an animated CBC special to ensure that a much-needed national conversation about reconciliation knocked onto the mainstream-media radar in Kingston wasn’t going away. He had an ace up his sleeve, too: Secret Path, a searing song cycle about the short, doomed life of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishnawbe boy who froze to death next to a Northern Ontario railway line in October of 1966 while trying to walk 600 kilometres home to his family from a residential school in Kenora. 20 watched live via the CBC by roughly one-third of the Canadian population.ĭuring that epochal performance Gord called out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was in attendance, to finally do something about the Canadian government’s historically dismal institutional and physical treatment of the country’s Indigenous peoples. Despite having already weathered two cranial surgeries and enduring regular, debilitating radiation and chemotherapy treatments to prolong his life, he nevertheless then embarked against all good medical advice that July on a history-making cross-Canada tour with his friends and bandmates of more than 30 years – unflinchingly dancing in costume astride the Jaws of death onstage each night – in support of The Hip’s final album, Man Machine Poem, that concluded with a hometown show at Kingston’s K-Rock Arena on Aug. ![]() Everyone involved in the making of Away Is Mine refers to it as “a gift,” and rightly so if you were fortunate enough to have your imagination captured by Gordon Edgar Downie during his lifetime, rest assured these recordings will capture and captivate it again.įirst, some context: Gord Downie, longtime frontman for a rock-‘n’-roll band of some repute from Kingston, Ontario, called The Tragically Hip, allowed it known to the world on May 24, 2016, that he had been stricken the previous December with an inoperable form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma. Also, you hold in your hands right now another superb Gord Downie record – one as singular and unpredictable and challenging and worthy of your prolonged, scholarly appraisal and/or simple enjoyment as Coke Machine Glow or Battle of the Nudes or The Grand Bounce or Gord Downie, The Sadies, and the Conquering Sun or Secret Path or Introduce Yerself – and that, in itself, should be cause for joy. There’s joy to be found within Away Is Mine despite the grim undercurrent gnawing away at its conception and its unguarded lyric sheet: joy in friendships, joy in family, joy in collaboration, joy in writing, joy in music and joy in mystery. ![]() ![]() And yet it took a fearless reckoning with his own mortality to get us here.ĭon’t give into the “sads,” though. Like all of the music and the poetry and the memories and the mad genius with which Gord gifted us during his 53 years on our planet, it is immortal. Away Is Mine is Gord Downie’s final solo recording, a characteristically questing and idiosyncratic piece of work steered to life by “my oldest Toronto friend,” guitarist and co-writer Josh Finlayson, that holds fast to its author’s unwavering artistic spirit, deft hand with words and forever inscrutable sense of humour even as he locks eyes head-on with the Great Inevitability. This, as decreed by fate, is the last one. “Eventually” just came to Gordon Edgar Downie with inconsiderate haste. Gordon Edgar Downie would have made this album eventually. ![]()
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