From the NY Times today (on the making of Introduce Yerself). RIP Gord.
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In the first week of January 2016, the Canadian singer-songwriter Gord Downie paid a visit to the Bathouse, the recording complex that his band, the Tragically Hip, owns in a small town outside Toronto. Rising early each morning, he put on a snowsuit and walked a short distance from the studio to the frozen shores of Lake Ontario, where he sat and hand-wrote lyrics in the cold.
About 10 days earlier, Mr. Downie had told friends that he had an aggressive, deadly form of brain cancer, which ultimately ended his life on Tuesday night at 53. Nearly six more months would pass before he shared the news of his illness with the public, in May 2016, followed by a short summer tour with the Hip, as the band is known, whose emotional finale was watched by millions worldwide. But first, Mr. Downie wanted to make one more album.
“Gord knew this day was coming,” Mr. Downie’s family said in a statement Wednesday. “His response was to spend this precious time as he always had — making music, making memories and expressing deep gratitude to his family and friends for a life well lived, often sealing it with a kiss … on the lips.”
The solo album that Mr. Downie spent his final months working on — “Introduce Yerself,” due out Oct. 27 — is a strikingly intimate record of an artist processing the shock of his own mortality. In this sense, it stands alongside recent farewells like David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” both released just days or weeks before those artists’ deaths. But as with much of Mr. Downie’s finest work with the Hip, there’s a feeling of specificity that sets it apart: The lyrics he wrote for its 23 tracks aren’t metaphors or prayers but detailed love letters addressed to friends, family members, old flames and other key figures from his life.
The place of honor that Mr. Downie occupies in Canada’s national imagination has no parallel in the United States. Imagine Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Michael Stipe combined into one sensitive, oblique poet-philosopher, and you’re getting close. The Tragically Hip’s music “helped us understand each other, while capturing the complexity and vastness of the place we call home,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement on Wednesday. “Our identity and culture are richer because of his music, which was always raw and honest — like Gord himself.”
“He’s a king,” Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, a lifelong Hip fan who produced “Introduce Yerself,” said earlier this month. “If you’re graced with spending time with him, he remembers it — he remembers your name, your husband or wife’s name, your kids’ names. He has an incredible way of giving you that spotlight when he’s in front of you.”
Mr. Drew entered a close fellowship with the older artist starting in 2013, co-producing the band’s “Man Machine Poem” and Mr. Downie’s solo album “Secret Path” (both of which were released last year). When he heard on Christmas Eve 2015 that Mr. Downie’s doctors had found a glioblastoma, he was distraught. Around 10 the next night, he sent Mr. Downie some piano demos over email after leaving a holiday dinner early. “I was thinking, maybe he’ll hear these, and I’ll feel a sense of connection,” Mr. Drew said. “Around 11:30, I went back into my email, and there was Gord, singing over the top of this song.”
They continued corresponding for a few days, with Mr. Drew sketching out chords on his piano at home, then emailing rough recordings to Mr. Downie, who added vocals and sent them back. “At one point, he said: ‘What are we doing here, Kev? It sounds like we’re making a record,’” Mr. Drew recalled. “I wrote him back and said, ‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’”
After New Year’s Day, they headed to the Bathouse to continue writing and recording with a small crew, including the musician Dave Hamelin; the engineer Nyles Spencer; and Dave Koster, a longtime associate of the Hip. Over four extraordinarily productive days at the studio, they made 17 songs, mostly using a minimal setup of piano, drums and guitar. Many were captured in single takes following Mr. Downie’s daily lyrical exercises by the lake. “We were documenting how he was feeling, very quickly,” Mr. Drew said. “There was an urgency that pushed us to create as much as we could. We knew that we needed to focus on pressing record.”
The shadow cast by Mr. Downie’s diagnosis hung heavy over the sessions. “You couldn’t say, ‘Hey, it’s going to be O.K.,’” Mr. Drew said. “But it felt like we were creating more time by being in the studio. If this was the way that we got to be with him, then that’s what we were doing.”
There were moments of real joy, too, like the recording of “You Me and the B’s,” in which Mr. Downie traces a life history through the lens of hockey fandom (“The Bruins kept us tight/We talked about them nearly every day/For over 40 years now”). The singer, his brother Mike Downie and Mr. Koster performed the song’s percussion using hockey sticks on the studio’s driveway on a subfreezing day. “We brought the mikes outside, and I was conducting like an orchestra guy with my headphones,” Mr. Drew said. “They were all swaying and laughing and having a great time.”
This February, the musicians reconvened for another four-day session that yielded 10 additional songs. The mood this time was one of celebration: Despite the memory loss caused by his advancing illness (last fall, he told the CBC, “I can’t remember hardly anything”), and the unfairness of it all, Mr. Downie was committed to finishing the album. “It was wonderful,” Mr. Drew said. “We were still together. There were still songs to be sung. And he really did pull off what he wanted to do, which is take that anger and turn it into love.”
Speaking two weeks before Mr. Downie’s death, Mr. Drew emphasized his collaborator’s warmth and generosity. “What’s irreplaceable about Gord is that whether you know him or not, he’s a friend of yours,” Mr. Drew said. “The letters that he wrote — he could have just kept writing and writing and writing. If it was up to Gord, we would be recording as we speak, right now.”
