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Gord DOWNIE
By King, Andrew
Easily one of the country's most prolific, profiled, and prized musicians. Gord Downie has been contributing to the cannon of Canadian rock for nearly three decades with The Tragically Hip and, more recently, under his own name as a solo artist. Though his voice is one of the most unique and celebrated in Canada, it's one of the few identifiable similarities that exist between the two projects. His latest solo release, The Grand Bounce by Gord Downie And The Country Of Miracles, is the current culmination of his growth as a songwriter and artist, the latter being greatly inspired by a wide range of influence from music, other arms of the arts, and invaluable interpersonal interactions. Armed with an array of fresh musical and thematic ideas and a supporting cast of very unique collaborators, the album boasts a depth and atmosphere that will easily engulf listeners, whether they're fans of his previous output or not.
The Country Of Miracles
"Where I am now with each of these musicians, in every case, seems almost like an incredible accident," shares the singer about the relationships he maintains with the members of his band. The Country Of Miracles, comprised of Julie Doiron (vocals, guitar, bass), Dale Morningstar (lead guitar), Dave Clark (drums), John Press (keyboards), and Josh Finlayson (bass, guitar). These musicians have, at one point or another, contributed to Downie's previous two albums, 2001 's Coke Machine Glow and 2003's Battle Of The Nudes, though are best represented as a united entity on The Grand Bounce.
"I've known )osh the longest," says Downie of his frequent collaborator and member of Canadian roots rockers Skydiggers. "He's really the first friend I made here in Toronto, and we've been like brothers ever since. I love him, and so does everybody else." It was Finlayson to whom Downie credits the support and push that helped him assemble and share his first solo offering - a support that hasn't wavered over the years.
Downie met Morningstar while recording Coke Machine Glow at the guitarist's Gas Station Recording Studio on the Toronto Islands. "We were the last session in there," recalls Downie about the process. "The wrecking ball was literally swinging outside the window, and they were wanting to tear the building down. All of the artists who'd been staying there were fleeing and wrecking their studio space as they left because they were so angry. It was a really interesting moment." To mark the rather unfortunate event, Downie invited Morningstar to play on one of the tracks, though as he explains, "he played on every track. And has played on every track since."
Along with Morningstar, Press (aka Dr. |ohnny Pee) and Clark make up Toronto blues-based trio The Dinner Is Ruined. Downie calls Press the "real professor of the group - literally. He's ready to go at every moment, and just loves what he's doing. That's really contagious." Clark, on the other hand, first filled in on Coke Machine Glow's sessions and simply stuck around. "He's the real rudder of the band onstage. We get out there and Dave pulls it back, drives it, slows it down. It's amazing to watch."
Finally, Downie and Doiron first crossed paths when her heralded previous outfit Eric's Trip opened for The Hip "a thousand years ago." At the time, both Doiron and Downie were new parents. "She was the only person I knew on the road who had a baby, so we really bonded backstage." Their voices intertwine gorgeous I y on songs like the back-andforth "Moon Over Glenora" or the charming "Broadcast," with their onstage chemistry only heightening such interactions. "I think we really enjoy singing with each other," says Downie simply. "She has such a cool voice and is an adventurous musician."
On The Grand Bounce, The Country Of Miracles was temporarily expanded to include Chris Walla. Guitarist for Death Cab For Cutie and a producer on projects by his own band, Tegan and Sara, The Decemberists, Hot Hot Heat, and of course, the latest from Downie, Walla had an enormous impact on The Grand Bounce.
"First and foremost, we're friends," says Downie of their camaraderie. The two first met at a music festival in Pemberton, BC a few years back, joTging an instant personal connection. After their meeting, while listening to Death Cab For Cutie's Narrow Stairs on his own, Downie was convinced the two were to make a record together. A phone call to his friend was all it took to turn that idea into a reality.
Walla came to Toronto from Portland in July of 2009, a month before the album was recorded, to learn the songs. "I wanted to sit down with him for a day or two and teach him the material," says Downie, "and then have him teach the band." He desired a distance between his compositions and how The Country Of Miracles would adapt the arrangements, and wanted Walla to give the songs some thought on his own. He sent several tracks as simple acoustic demos to his producer, allowing him to formulate his own ideas. Says Downie: "I listened back to those the other day, actually, and the arrangements didn't change too much."
It was the essential addition of Walla and The Country Of Miracles that Downie feels really brought the project to life - "to put their touches on it and coalesce that into the sound a band makes, which is really the sound of something disappearing as it's happening."
Walla was also involved in the technical aspects of the album's assembly, engineering and mixing the songs at Kingston, ON's The Bathouse Recording Studio and Alberta Court in Portland, OR, respectively. "Sonically, what I find interesting about Death Cab records." shares Downie, "and I didn't even realize this until he was mixing my record, is that the way he mixes turns every song into an event, or a series of events."
He elaborates: "It doesn't go linearly, even though a lot of these songs are very linear. Every eight to 16 bars, you're turning a corner, with the addition of an instrument or some other element. He's just changing the atmosphere of the song, so the songs unfold very elegantly to the extent that when I'd get the mixes from him, I was practically in tears. I just couldn't believe what he was doing." It was a quality that Downie humbly asserts he could never have even begun to communicate or formulate into an expressed desire, but one for which he's extremely thankful.
Quite simply, Downie says that his friend "knows how to serve the song. He knows what a song needs and what it doesn't need. " The trust between the two is apparent in Downie's dialogue, and something that the artist believes is critical to any project.
The synergy that forms between artist and producer is one in which Downie places a great deal of weight. "Any producer I've worked with has had tremendous influence," he says of all of his previous works. "That's what they do. There may be instances where bands try and fight that or resist that. You don't always have a long courtship -it's an arranged marriage in some cases." In his experience, though, that relationship has always proven fruitful.
"We've worked with some really great people," he says, citing his experiences with Canadian hitmaker Bob Rock and Walla as having "changed [his] life." He's seeking not only a producer, but a friend for life that he can invite into a work of art and enhance its development - again, all about trust. "You need people that understand you're making something that's forever. It should be fun, exhilarating, joyous, and everything you dreamed it would be. Anything less is... less."
He truly believes he's never had a bad recording experience. There will always be snags, setbacks, and disappointments, but the final product and what you've learned from the process are ultimately the indicators of success.
The Grand Bounce
"All of the music is mine," states Downie about the 13 tracks that comprise his latest release. "The band has always been great about encouraging me and pushing me to let my freak flag fly," he says about his Country Of Miracles. The songs are much different than anything we've heard from him to date, either on his own or with The Tragically Hip.
Downie's signature vocal style and timbre is unmistakable, delivered with plenty of passion and honesty, though is likely one of the few elements of the album that will be familiar to fans of either The Tragically Hip or even his previous two solo releases. When contrasted with Coke Machine Clow or Battle Of The Nudes, The Grand Bounce feels much more expansive in its presentation. Indeed, the album is the most upbeat of the three, bringing the talents of his fellow musicians prominently to the forefront. The songs are rooted in rock, though influence from folk, country, and alternative music are all present, glued together with the intangible bit of Canadiana for which he and each of his collaborators in The Country Of Miracles are well-known.
The soundscapes of cuts like "The Drowning Machine" or "The East Wind" are large and lush; however, while the latter's sound progresses to nothing but enormous, as its title might suggest, it's also very organic. The title and part of its chorus may have been borrowed, but Downie's development of the idea transforms it into something you can almost touch.
Conversely, songs like "Yellow Days" and "The Hard Canadian" are far more subdued, bringing a more direct focus to Downie's lyricism. Both are as Canuck as can be in style and poetic substance, "The Hard Canadian" being inspired by a conversation with filmmaker and Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg who described a current project as "hard Canadian and dope." The song centres on a universal character that may not be in the least bit graceful or endearing, yet strangely relatable. Fans of The Tragically Hip will easily be drawn into "The Dance And Its Disappearance," likely where the line is most blurred between Downie's two outlets, at least during its chorus, where the music is tightly-locked, inviting, and cradles one of the more immediate and urgent vocal deliveries on the album.
"The Hip has always been a writing collective, so called," explains Downie about his other project, from which he still seems to extract an equal joy. For the first several Tragically Hip releases, Downie was solely contributing the lyrical content, though as time went on, he would start contributing more to the musical compositions. "It still starts with someone coming forward with a musical idea," he shares, "and then everyone sort of has at it." And while there are sure to be similarities between his two projects, the material on The Grand Bounce, like its two predecessors, is far more his own.
"You get to do everything. The realm of choice almost becomes overwhelming," he says 0/ writing independently - a process to which he still might not be totally accustomed. "In The Hip, I vie and jostle and elbow for that [input], as we all do," he says of the more communal compositions. "And in a perfect world, that should be what it is. Never personal - just the work."
When it comes to how he decides which of his musical musings would be better suited to which project, Downie adopts the ethos of writer Raymond Carver: using up ideas and not saving a thing for later. "I don't worry about segregation (between the two) too much. That would give me a headache," he says frankly. "Someone asked me how I know what's a Hip song, and I don't. I don't think about it - I just use it up. As dire as it sounds, I don't even know if I'm going to be here tomorrow, so I don't get to precious or cute about it."
His work between the two entities has continually contributed to his ongoing progression as a musician, songwriter, and artist. "[My albums] chronicle a musical education - learning and growing," he explains, citing the fact that the songs of Coke Machine Clow were mostly simple three-chord progressions. It's not only his musical expansions, though, that have attributed to The Grand Bounce, but also those of his external influences.
Inspiration From Everywhere
"Like most people, I'm inspired by people - people in my life that I'm fortunate enough to meet, and love, and watch," says Downie, obviously passionate about the interactions that fuel his creative fire.
"I've been in Toronto now for 20 years and am raising a family here, which was a conscious decision," he explains, "to give them a cultural upbringing, which is something [my wife and l] never had growing up in small towns." He explains that while city life comes with its own set of challenges that still feel foreign to him - "How old should kids be before riding the subway by themselves?" - the chance to be richly exposed to arts and culture is one from which he wants his family to benefit.
With the same intentions in mind, he recently spent some time by James Bay with his children, watching their guide take on the monumental tasks of preparing for moose hunting season. Downie cites the "incredible freedom he had - to do the hard work they do without complaint," as a fresh breath of inspiration and learning.
He regularly looks to other disciplines of the arts as well. The theme of "The Dance And Its Disappearance," for example, stems from a quote by Canadian choreographer and performer Crystal Pite - a quote shared in the booklet that accompanies 7"Ae Grand Bounce. She says, in part:
Dance disappears almost at the moment of its manisfestation it is an extreme expression of the present, a perfect metaphor for life. Dancers sculpt space in real time, working inside a form that is constantly in a state of vanishing. We have no artifacts.
Ideas and ideals from dancers like Pite and Andrea Nann are present in Downie's work both artistically and practically, he says, noting that many are able to put on stunningly captivating performances with very small budgets, combining components like projection, lighting, the performance, and the message to create something beautiful, "choreographed down to the nano second."
His live performances are similarly disappearing as they take place. "And I'm okay with that," he says. "Other industries are scrambling to do the exact opposite - capture, capture, capture. The art is often resistant to such a process." On his current Canadian tour in support of The Grand Bounce, Downie employs the use of a makeshift projector, atop the surface of which he'll swirl liquids of different colours and textures, or set-up scenes that while they remain static, seem to move with the musical performance.
For Downie. it's all about those transient moments. "You can film it on your phone, but you're really only getting 10 per cent, so you're better off putting your phone away and taking it in," he says of any in-the-moment experience. "You can try and explain it later, after gauging what you took in, what you got from it, and what you want to get more of."
After the release of The Grand Bounce earlier in the summer of 2010, Cord Downie and The Country Of Miracles began touring the festival circuit, performing at 15 events of a very disparate nature - folk, rock, blues - and "never really fitting in at any of them, which in itself was a great thrill. We were playing to some people who were sticking their fingers in their ears at a folk festival, and if they had axes. I'm sure they'd have been chopping our snake."
It's the newfound ability to garner that huge range of fresh reactions that the artist currently finds thrilling about his time on the road with the project. "There aren't too many people coming to Hip shows that don't like the Hip," he says, though that's not to say he gets any less enjoyment from those performances. "It's an entirely different thing. [The Hip] is very physical and challenging and demanding. I relish that."
The ability to tour on the festival circuit has allowed the band to get comfortable with the material, though they're not overly careful with it. Instead, the band allows the songs to be what they want to be onstage. "We let them ramble," explains Downie. "We let them run on. We let them fall down and get back up again." A US tour in support of The Grand Bounce will ring in the New Year, at which point Downie says he'll simply assess what's ready to go after that.
"I'll always feel that for a show to be great, something has to happen," shares the singer about the type of performance he and his band consistently aim to deliver. "It sounds pretty ambiguous, but you know it when you're up there. You have to get it wrong. You have to make mistakes. You have to take risks. That's just in my book, but we're not holograms after all."
And though he may reference his own "book" with an extreme humility, coming from one of the pillars of contemporary Canadian rock music, that book is no doubt considered by many to be gospel.
"We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream"
Dana
