The Tragically Hip, Essential Listening

Where do I begin?  Violins and Tambourines, and this is what I think it means ...

Last night was possibly the last public performance ever by one of Canada's favorite bands, The Tragically Hip.  There.  I've already pissed off 72% of Canadians reading this, who will quickly proclaim that there's no doubt whatsoever that they are THE favorite.  And judging from my Facebook feed last night during the concert, and judging also by the fact that nine of the top ten trending topics on Twitter at one point were directly related to The Hip, I'd find it hard to argue.  I just don't want to appear biased, because in fact, they're my own favorite band.  Click HERE to read a post I wrote about them close to a decade ago, which the Hip ended up featuring on the home page of their website, www.TheHip.com.

CBC live-streamed their final concert, a show in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario.  Let me throw out a quick comment to say that anyone who doesn't understand why Canada should have a national broadcaster may want to re-think their position after last night.  Also, kudos to CBC for ensuring that NO advertising was inserted into the entire broadcast, which lasted almost three hours.  That broadcast is not currently available online yet for replay, but should be soon.

The main reason that I started to write this post is because I promised a friend of mine, Nikki, that I would to try further her musical education about the band.  Like all Canadians, she knows a number of their more well-known commercially-successful songs.  But I said that I'd put together a playlist for her of what I considered to be Hip Essential Listening.

Let me preface by saying that this post will create all sorts of controversy among Hip afficionados.  Why?  Because I haven't included ANY songs in my "Twenty Classic Hip Songs" from anything other than their first four albums.  Somehow, I feel that this is going to create a firestorm of controversy among a number of my friends who are also huge Hip fans.  Admittedly, I'm going to mention a few tracks from [studio] albums five and six.  And don't think that I dislike albums after "Day For Night."  Take "Trouble At The Henhouse," for example.  I feel that this album is their most consistent in terms of flow, and it's best listened to in one sitting, start to finish.  Sadly, that's a concept that seems to have disappeared these days, in our digital work of being able to download individual tracks.  "Trouble At The Henhouse," is more of a musical voyage, although there are only a few songs on it that also want to be able to stand on their own.  That album also has my favorite production approach, with a very warm, crunchy-without-treble, analogue distortion sound on the guitars (except on Ahead By A Century).

Anyway, I'm going to break my recommended tracks down into three groups:  Twenty "Classic Hip," six classic slower songs, and eight other great songs that saw varying degrees of commercial success.

First, my twenty "Classic Hip."  As mentioned, these aren't always the most well-known fan favorites (and I put slower songs into a second group further down this page).  I'll be castigated by some fans due to some of my intentional omissions from this list.  My rationale?  For someone who is only starting to discover more than a smattering of Hip songs, I want to be able to introduce you to songs that show lyrical and musical craftsmanship.  You can click on each of the song titles to find YouTube versions of the songs, although most are not actual videos, just audio recordings.  To avoid the agony of trying to rank them in terms of my favorites, I'm going to list the twenty in chronological/album order:

01. She Didn’t Know [Up To Here]
02. Boots Or Hearts [Up To Here]
03. Every Time You Go [Up To Here]
04. Another Midnight [Up To Here]
05. Opiated [Up To Here]
06. Little Bones [Road Apples]
07. Born In The Water [Road Apples]
08. Three Pistols [Road Apples]
09. On The Verge [Road Apples]
10. Courage [Fully Completely]
11. Looking For A Place To Happen [Fully Completely]
12. At The Hundredth Meridian [Fully Completely]
13. Locked In The Trunk Of A Car [Fully Completely]
14. Fully Completely [Fully Completely]
15. Fifty Mission Cap [Fully Completely]
16. Eldorado [Fully Completely]
17. Grace, Too [Day For Night]
18. So Hard Done By [Day For Night]
19. Nautical Disaster [Day For Night]
20. Thugs [Day For Night]

Some of my personal favorites are definitely far off the beaten commercial track, songs like Eldorado, On The Verge, and Opiated.


Let me also throw out six songs with slower tempos, most of which (aside from #4) became Canadian classics:

01. 38 Years Old [Up To Here]
02. Long Time Running [Road Apples]
03. Fiddler’s Green [Road Apples]
04. Last Of The Unplucked Gems [Road Apples]
05. Wheat Kings [Fully Completely]
06. Scared [Day For Night]


Finally, if you really don't know The Hip's music at all, here are some other hits that you should check out.  Most of these saw more mainstream success than my Top Twenty.  Why didn't I include them in my Classic Hip list?  Well, I guess it's because these songs saw more mainstream success, and I didn't want a lot of the band's other early work to be overshadowed by these songs.

01. Blow at High Dough [Up To Here]
02. New Orleans Is Sinking [Up To Here]
03. Gift Shop [Trouble At The Henhouse]
04. Ahead By A Century [Trouble At The Henhouse]
05. Poets [Phantom Power]
06. Bobcaygeon [Phantom Power]
07. Fireworks [Phantom Power]
08. My Music At Work [Music @ Work]

Most importantly, if you like my choices, I've turned the whole series (34 songs, all three lists) into a giant "Essential Hip" playlist, which is accessible to the public.  Here you go if you want to bookmark it:

The "Essential Hip" playlist on YouTube

I currently have it sorted by default to the same play order as what I've listed in the three lists above.  However, once it starts playing, you can press shuffle (which I recommend) to vary the order of the songs.


So there you go.  I look forward to a stream of comments about my choices.  I'll close by saying that I did agonize for a bit about whether or not to include Ahead By A Century in my main Essential Hip list.  In the end, I didn't, for reasons that I'm not even certain of.  I think one of my goals for this winter will be to release a few cover versions of Hip Songs.  So to be fair, lest anyone think I'm hating on "Ahead By A Century," I'll make sure that I prioritize doing a recording of that song as a winter project.  Stay tuned.







Also, for anyone who wants to compare my picks with the set list from the final concert in Kingston on August 20th (which was amazingly watched by an estimated 11.7 million viewers), here's what they played:

Main Act

50 Mission Cap

Courage

Wheat Kings

At the Hundredth Meridian

In a World Possessed by the Human Mind

What Blue

Tired As F---

Machine

My Music at Work

Lake Fever

Toronto #4

Putting Down

Twist My Arm

Three Pistols

Fiddler's Green

Little Bones

The Last Of The Unplucked Gems

Something On

Poets

Bobcaygeon

Fireworks

Encore 1

New Orleans Is Sinking

Boots or Hearts

Blow at High Dough

Encore 2

Nautical Disaster

Scared

Grace, Too

Encore 3

Locked In The Trunk Of A Car

Gift Shop

Ahead By A Century

I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia.  Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production?  If so, visit:

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The Tragically Hip

I saw the Tragically Hip playing in Halifax last night at the Metro Centre. It was packed, not surprisingly. And since my blog is read by a lot of music fans who live outside of Canada, I need to do a bit of promotion here. If you’re Canadian, you can pretty much stop reading now, because you’ll already know a lot about this band. But if you want to learn more, carry on.





First, you need to know that “The Hip” are Canada’s greatest rock band. The drummer, Johnny Fay, was once interviewed by Billboard, and when the subject of being in Canada’s best band came up, he said it was, “kind of like being the world’s tallest midget.” In 1989, the band apparently did a show where they opened for Nirvana, and less than a hundred people showed up.

The group has ten studio albums to their credit at the moment (disregarding their first self-titled album, which was only an EP). If I had to pick my favorites, I would recommend their first five albums, starting with “Up To Here,” and with “Fully Completely” probably being my top choice. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to any of the albums that came after “Trouble At The Henhouse.” I need to go out and buy the others though, because I know a few of the songs on them, and I know that I'm missing out on other gems.

I’ve seen the Hip perform dozens of times. The first times were in Banff in 1990. I had a few weeks off from my summer job planting trees, so I decided to hitchhike to Banff to wash dishes in a restaurant (The Magie & Stump) to pass the time for a week. During that week, I went with a couple friends to the Silver City nightclub every single evening. There was a band playing, and I thought that they were pretty good. Nobody else seemed to agree, because except for Friday and Saturday night, there were only about ten people in the bar each night. Anyway, after seeing them the first night, I was hooked. I kept coming back, and I watched them from about ten feet away, five or six nights that week. It wasn’t until about four or five years later, when they were starting to get famous and I saw them play at Mount Allison University, that I recognized them and realized that it was the same band. Since then, I’ve seen them in quite a few full concerts, and I also saw them in a small venue in Edmonton when they did their album release for “In Between Evolution,” with just a couple hundred people invited. I have photos from that night online here:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_hip.html

An interesting thing about the Hip is that if I had to pick my favorite five songs, I couldn’t. Not a chance. I might be able to get away with my favorite thirty, but even that would be hard to narrow down. Their music and sound are solid, and even though I’m not usually one to pay a lot of attention to lyrics, Gord Downie is brilliant. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if he writes all the lyrics. I’ve always assumed so, because he is their lead singer, but that’s not necessarily true. His improvisational abilities in live shows though, are legendary.

“New Orleans Is Sinking” was one of their earliest songs, written a decade and a half ago, and it’s one of their best-known songs. However, after Katrina, many radio stations stopped playing it in deference to the residents of New Orleans. The Hip are actually playing a show in New Orleans on October 20th of this year.

Anyway, so if you like rock music, and haven’t listened to this band before, take a Canadian’s advice and check them out. If this is the first you’ve heard about them, you’re missing out on one of Canada’s best-kept secrets.