Downie's last album a lovely, haunting gift
Prepare to be haunted by Downie's Away is Mine
On the road to Gordon Edgar Downie knowing there was no turning back from his incurable glioblastoma, man did that little turbine get to work.
First, it was recording a double album of personal valentines — the tear-triggering Introduce Yerself — and then came that famous cross-country tour, the last night of which roughly one-third of Canada's population tuned in to, breathless.
In a sort of spiritual conjunction with him calling for Justin Trudeau, in the audience at the final concert in Kingston, to do a better job of Indigenous reconciliation, Downie then released his musical art project with comic artist Jeff Lemire, The Secret Path, recorded in 2013. And those protest songs were the last Downie performed in front of a proper live audience, so important was the story of residential schools victim Chanie Wenjack to him, and now to so many more of us.
After this, as the clock blindly ticked on, Downie still found a project and recorded the songs for Away Is Mine, the seventh Downie sorta-solo album we're talking about today.
According to his brother Patrick Downie, “He worked to stay sane. But he always worked to stay sane. It was just something to work on and not stare out the windows contemplating when the bus was gonna come, which was always the subtext.”
After a marathon extended-weekend session in July 2017 at the Tragically Hip's Bathouse Studio was finished, says Patrick, “it was kind of the `last gasp' almost because when Gord got done this one, Gord went irretrievably downhill.”
He was gone by Oct. 17.
The album is actually two, or put another way, one and its acoustic echo. It came out on
Arts & Crafts this week.
Downie and his longtime collaborator and Skydiggers co-founder Josh Finlayson worked on these 10 contemplative numbers together, about half an hour of songs, sending lyrics and vocals and melodies back and forth over the phone.
The album that resulted is quiet and weird and thoughtful, and sounds a little like it comes from
the future, so designed because Finlayson wasn't sure when it would actually all come together: timelines get weird in the House of the Dead. But here we are, three years later in the middle of you know what global troubles, with a piece of legitimate art to consider and distract and inspire.
Typically, I'd break through an album song by song in order, but the way Finlayson blends the tracks with electronic keyboard transitions rather adds to the way poet Downie keeps revisiting the same ideas, hopping between songs in deference to form. The gist of this is most focused in River Don't Care, where he sings, “I write about words, try to make them sound like my thoughts of nature, will still accept me, no matter what I want.” Later, in a totally different song, the wistful Traffic Is Magic, he sings, “I am writing about words to sound like my thoughts, words about words that nature nor I want.”
Now, of course, Downie may have just been developing an idea over a couple songs and this may have been edited if there was more time, but in either event I love the continuity, and it actually rears up elsewhere, too, this idea that echoes his long-ago thought of thinking about drinking, loving recovering. It's all still here.
The 10 songs of album 1 sit on drum beats, and have an early '80s Talking Heads/r.e.m. Monster quirky awkwardness going for them, classic solo Downie for sure. Four in, About Blank is an actual stomper, the album's first proper rocker, helped in part by the mighty Travis Good of the Sadies, one of Downie's recurring collaborators. Some of the most touching lyrics in the mix are on this jangler — great advice, to boot: “Come be surrounded by those who love you the most,” which you feel he did more than any man in Canadian history.
The Least Impossible sounds like a brilliant little kid wrote it, Downie's words getting right to it as he sings sort of bittersweetly, sort of skipping down the lane, “I want what's beautiful, I don't need what's true. I don't want the dark, I don't want the end, I don't even want the dark preview.” Both the electro and acoustic versions of this song are jarring and wonderful performances, which is actually true of it all.
By the time he gets to Untitled at the end, well, you might want to sit down for this one, especially the backing-into-the-stadium-echo acoustic version. You will probably like each version more than its twin at one point, then change your mind.
I hate that he's gone; I love that he's not. This is ghost music, intellectually alive, thankfully more causal than not, surviving the weight of death and loss, his and yours. So prepare to be haunted. But we need this one right now way more than another AM radio hit.