Gord Downie - Secret Path - Printable Version
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Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Tthip - 10-18-2016
So it doesn't disappear:
direwolf74 Wrote:Great review from Darryl Sterdan.Gord Downie’s ‘Secret Path’ the most relevant work of his career
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.torontosun.com/2016/10/18/gord-downies-secret-path-the-most-relevant-work-of-his-career">http://www.torontosun.com/2016/10/18/go ... his-career</a><!-- m -->
Darryl Sterdan
Today at 11:41 AM
The Tragically Hip front man Gord Downie performing at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa on Thursday August 18, 2016. Errol McGihon/Postmedia
article
Gord Downie has spent three decades chronicling and commemorating the history and mystery of Canada.
But the Tragically Hip frontman’s fifth (and perhaps final) solo album is no cause for celebration — it’s a grim remembrance of a shamefully overlooked national disgrace.
Secret Path, due Oct. 18, is a concept album that recounts the sad death of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old indigenous boy who died of exposure and hunger beside a railway line after running away from a residential school in Kenora, Ont., 50 years ago this week. It’s a disturbing story that Downie has said “haunts” him. “His story is Canada’s story,” the 52-year-old singer wrote in a statement. “This is about Canada. We are not the country we thought we were … We are not the country we think we are.”
Downie hasn’t been shy lately in voicing concern over the treatment of Canada’s Indigenous people and Northern residents. But his fascination with Wenjack’s story isn’t new. Secret Path was actually recorded in late 2013 with producers Kevin Drew and Dave Hamelin (who also helmed the Hip’s Man Machine Poem). Its release was presumably delayed while graphic novelist Jeff Lemire turned it into a book that accompanies the album, which led to an animated special airing on CBC Oct. 23.
It was well worth the wait. Deeply moving and artfully experimental, Secret Path is not only Downie’s most focused solo effort, it may be the most relevant work of his career (and that’s saying something). Along with bringing Wenjack’s tale into the public eye, the disc is a fundraiser for The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. And even though he continues to battle terminal brain cancer — and just wrapped the Hip’s farewell tour in August — the project is important enough to lure him back onstage for two Secret Path shows this week in Ottawa and Toronto.
Between all that — and the slew of well-deserved awards he’s likely to amass for this — maybe there’s cause for celebration after all. But first, let’s survey Secret Path’s 10 songs:
1 | The Stranger 5:32
Over a dark acoustic guitar, twinkling piano notes and ringing chords, we are introduced to Chanie — and his alienation — as he flees his residential school. “I am the stranger, you can’t see me,” Downie proclaims. “And what I’m feeling is anyone’s guess.”
2 | Swing Set 3:20
We flash back to the playground as Chanie and two classmates prepare to run while the teacher is distracted. “‘Now?’ I asked. ‘Not yet,’ you said,” Gord sings atop noisy rock and squiggly sonics that underscore the tension — and geese that honk as the boys fly.
3 | Seven Matches 3:31
Given to Chanie by a woman whose family sheltered him, a jar with seven matches comforts the runaway — though their number dwindles as the song progresses. For his part, Gord’s falsetto vocal is matched with his gently strummed guitar and a softly chugging beat.
4 | I Will Not Be Struck 4:02
“I’m not going back,” Downie sings near the top of his register, communicating Chanie’s resolve as he ventures into the wilderness along the tracks. Another thumpy beat, a nimble bassline and some understated electric guitar make the cut surprisingly upbeat.
5 | Son 3:17
“Don’t stop wishing what you wish,” Downie sings, apparently voicing sentiments of Chanie’s dad. It’s hard to tell whether this one is sung from the father’s perspective, or if Chanie is reminiscing. Perhaps fittingly, it’s a shapeshifting number that builds from ambient tones to swelling chords and ominous bass drops.
6 | Secret Path 4:12
Freezing rain and ice pellets begin to fall, leaving Chanie woefully unprotected in his jacket. “It’s a windbreaker, it’s not a jean jacket,” Downie wails over a grim low-end piano ballad. “I am soaked to the skin. There’s never been a colder rain than this one I’m in.”
7 | Don't Let This Touch You 5:05
Chanie tries to stay strong, but begins to lose resolve. “Words don’t make the rain go,” Downie laments as the song toggles between quiet verses with swooping basslines and explosive, soaring refrains.
8 | Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them 5:02
Driven by a tense beat and stabbing bass, the music parallels Chanie’s growing fear. “I think I’m in despair, the wind is in the trees, basically just waiting for something to come along and eat me,” Downie spits out. As the song builds, Chanie has a vision of a raven who offers a solution: “What you can’t escape you’ve got to embrace.”
9 | The Only Place To Be 2:55
“I’ll just close my eyes, I’ll just catch my breath,” Gord sings as Chanie surrenders to his fate over a tender, Wilco-esque number decorated with squiggles and puffs of breath. As the wolves approach, the music slowly swells.
10 | Here, Here and Here 4:11
A piano line slowly takes shape amid buzzing, ringing, swooping and droning tones as Chanie seemingly speaks from beyond: “I hurt here, here and here … I died here, here and here.” Otherworldly voices enter the scene as a quiet rhythm comes to a final stop.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - spasticreelin - 10-18-2016
Great experience flipping through this book while listening - beautifully crafted story and songs....
I hope it is successful as hell...
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - potsie - 10-18-2016
Review from The Globe and Mail:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/gord-downies-secret-path-delivers-on-its-heavy-ambition/article32407765/">http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/mus ... e32407765/</a><!-- m -->
Title Secret Path
Artist Gord Downie
Label Arts & Crafts
Genre Rock
Rating 3.5/4
Year 2016
Deep into his elegiac and conceptual album Secret Path (out Tuesday), Gord Downie talk-sings hard against an insistent bass-and-drum beat and and a steel-blue synthesized mood. “I know a way that I can help you,” says a raven to a boy who is cold, hungry and hopelessly lost in the wilderness. “What you can’t escape, you gotta embrace.”
The track increases in intensity, eventually bursting open into an orchestral rock surge. It’s called Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them, which advocates a plan for escaping a “plain, ordinary death” by way of legacy that involves an unsettling story about an injustice which very few people wanted to hear of for a very long time.
To describe Secret Path as merely the Tragically Hip front man’s fifth solo album would be a tremendous feat of underselling. Its ambition is heavy; its cause, significant.
Recorded in the late fall of 2013, the LP of passionate message and elegant indie rock began as 10 Downie-written poems, inspired by the story of Chanie (Charlie) Wenjack, a 12-year-old boy who in 1966 died in flight from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ont. He was walking in hopes of reaching the home and family from which he was taken, more than 600 kilometres away.
The story was first told to Canada through a devastating story written by Ian Adams for Maclean’s magazine in 1967, The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack. The young, frail, Ojibwa Indian who loved to fish was one of about 150,000 aboriginal children placed in a national network of church-run boarding schools, where they were un-Indianed and mistreated in almost every conceivable way.
Seeking reunification with his father, the boy was walking along a railway track, which is where his body was found. “It’s a story that should be told,” a Canadian National Railway foreman said at the time, speaking about the unknown but not uncommon tragedy. “We tell this man he has to send his son to one of our schools, then we bring his boy back on a luggage car.”
With the 10-song Secret Path, released in a deluxe vinyl version with an accompanying graphic novel by Jeff Lemire (and as a book with a download code), Downie brings attention to a national wrong and puts a name to an ugly racial mishandling.
“All of those governments, and all of those churches, for all of those years, misused themselves,” Downie writes in a statement. “They hurt many children. They broke up many families. They erased entire communities. It will take seven generations to fix this. Seven. Seven is not arbitrary. This is far from over. Things up north have never been harder. Canada is not Canada. We are not the country we think we are.”
The album does not rant. Produced by Dave Hamelin (formerly of the disbanded Stills) and Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, its warm textures are enveloping, healing and often softly cinematic. Opening track The Stranger begins with a strummed acoustic-guitar motif and sustained piano chords. It is an intimate and lovely introduction.
Swing Set rocks in a soulful and uplifting way, thanks no doubt to the Broken Social Scene sensibilities of Drew and his kick-drum heart. Chanie is on the playground, wondering whether or not to make a run for it. We hear panting and geese; Chanie takes off.
On the dreamy ballad Seven Matches (a reference to the only objects the ill-prepared fleeing boy had in his possession), Downie’s voice is in its uppermost range.
Side A closes with Son, a strummed hug and a gentle guidance to one’s offspring. “Even as the world convulses,” sings Downie, a father of four, “don’t stop wishing what you wish.”
Downie wrote the words to Secret Path well before he was diagnosed late last year with terminal brain cancer. But now, with the dire prognosis in mind, hearing him sing, “Son, when you dance, I’ll be on your shoulder, and you’ll feel it,” comes with an emotional wallop.
Side B begins with the title track, a simple and powerful piano number with a stage-worthy performance from Downie on vocals. Chanie’s windbreaker isn’t doing what it’s designed to do, and the rain that is falling is colder than he’s ever known.
By the calm and melodically quirky The Only Place to Be, a peaceful resignation sets in: “I’ll just close my eyes/ I’ll just catch my breath/ this is the only place to be.”
Here, Here And Here is an atmospheric and poetic conclusion.
This album may very well be the last one we hear from Downie. If so, it is a graceful, auspicious walk-off. Chanie’s tragedy is a symbol of a misguided social policy; his story, because of Downie, outlives him.
As for unforeseen trails, as the novelist Guy Gavriel Kay wrote, “There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.” That doesn’t explain Chanie’s story, but it says something about Downie and his own path he could not have seen coming.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - chancellor - 10-18-2016
I bought mine through Amazon. I got a notification today saying they shipping it out tomorrow and I will have it next Tuesday.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - chagrinfalls - 10-18-2016
I just got back from the Secret Path performance here in Ottawa. Advice for folks seeing it in Toronto:
bring extra tissues.
it was an incredible evening.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Tthip - 10-18-2016
If you purchased Secret Path from the official site you may go back to the site and your download is now available.
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Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - edgoffin - 10-18-2016
Amazing show in Ottawa, just a really unique event. I won't go into details to ruin it for people attending TO, but Gord is leaving behind a true legacy. There were signs about the show being recorded, so I assume we''ll see some release in the future.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Tomacco - 10-18-2016
Kind of curious though - is it true the performance is just a one-hour top-to-bottom performance of the album?
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Tthip - 10-18-2016
Ottawa review:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-reviews/downies-secret-path-both-dream-like-heart-wrenching">http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/ ... -wrenching</a><!-- m -->
Downie's Secret Path both dream-like, heart-wrenching
Gord Downie’s Secret Path
Reviewed Tuesday
Gord Downie brought the tragic story of Chanie Wenjack to life at the National Arts Centre on Tuesday during a beautiful but heart-wrenching concert.
Secret Path, the newly released fifth solo outing by the Tragically Hip singer, is a multimedia concept album inspired by Wenjack’s story. He was the 12-year-old indigenous boy who ran away from a residential school 50 years ago this month, and died trying to walk home, more than 600 kilometres away.
Downie’s project began three years ago, well before he was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. After his brother, filmmaker Mike Downie, heard the story of Chanie on the radio and shared it with Gord, the singer wrote a series of poems. They expanded into songs with the help of the production team of Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and former Stills member Dave Hamelin. Over the next couple of years, the project grew in scope: a graphic novel was created by Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire, and then an animated film.
All of the components of the ambitious project found their place during a magical performance in front of a sold-out audience that included members of the Downie and Wenjack families, indigenous leaders and elders, members of the Hip and fans.
Drew and Hamelin were part of Downie’s supergroup of a band, along with Barenaked Ladies’ Kevin Hearn, Skydiggers’ Josh Finlayson and Charles Spearin, of Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think.
The music pulsed with rhythm, but was also brushed into a dream-like soundscape with synthesizers, piano, keyboards and acoustic guitar. In jeans, a buttoned-up jean jacket, wide-brimmed hat and scarf, Downie spoke little, but sang with his usual passion and intensity. He displayed the full range of his distinctive voice, from a whisper to a howl, and even a piercing falsetto.
On a big screen over the musicians’ heads, the animated film depicting Chanie’s journey unfolded as each song was performed. It was a track-by-track reading of the album, from the opening single, The Stranger, when we see Chanie and other students at the school getting their hair cut, being showered and huddling under the covers in a row of beds, to the fade-out of the final song, Here, Here and Here, after Chanie closes his eyes, passing into golden warmth of his home.
The standing ovation that greeted the performance showed the audience was moved. To paraphrase Mike Downie’s words when he addressed the crowd near the end of the evening, listening could be the first true step towards reconciliation.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Dire Wolf - 10-18-2016
An unforgettable vocal performance by Gord tonight in Ottawa, with his Hip band mates sitting with us regular folks, near the back on the orchestra section, supporting him.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - edgoffin - 10-18-2016
Tomacco Wrote:Kind of curious though - is it true the performance is just a one-hour top-to-bottom performance of the album?
Yes, the band plays the album with the animated visuals behind them.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Naga - 10-18-2016
Dire Wolf Wrote:An unforgettable vocal performance by Gord tonight in Ottawa, with his Hip band mates sitting with us regular folks, near the back on the orchestra section, supporting him.
The highlight of my night was probably when my fiance elbowed Gord Sinclair's wife as she tried to butt in front of us on the way out.
But seriously, he sang beautifully and it was an honour to even be a part of such a night.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - The Heron Outside - 10-19-2016
If anyone in Toronto is looking for the deluxe ed of the record, Rotate This has a bunch of copies for only $45. That's less than what I've seen it in many online retailers.
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - Scotty12 - 10-19-2016
Thanks for the heads up
Was deluxe for sale at the show? If so, for how much?
Re: Gord Downie - Secret Path - redhill - 10-19-2016
package arrived yesterday
they did this right from every angle
kudos to all involved
very very special