[Killer Whale Tank]

The song makes me feel optimistic and melancholy at the same time. I can't get enough of it, feels very heartfelt. Going to try and figure out some of the guitar parts tonight.

Yes, a lot of later Hip songs have that effect on me. 'We Want to be It' is a prime example. They work with a more complicated emotional palette, musically, than they used to.

This is exactly what I love about the last few Hip albums. The fact that they continue to evolve and mature as artists and songwriters after 30+ years together is pretty remarkable when you think about it. Earlier in the thread someone described this song as being "magical", and I couldn't agree more. I moved to a new city last year, and when I heard this song it conjured up all kinds of nostalgic feelings for my hometown and the people I left behind there, and all sorts of memories came flooding back. The song definitely has that wistful/melancholic feel to it, but there's some hopefulness in there as well. When music can take you to those places, that's a pretty powerful thing.

So yea, long story short (too late), I think it's a beautiful song.

It's a funny thing. Most music critics and putative sophisticates have long since dismissed the Hip as an uninteresting, static band that does the same staid thing all the time. Like you, I completely disagree with this; in fact I think it's based on a confusion of the clothes (which are indeed static and boring) with the music. True that the Hip have not been musical chameleons, forever changing genres like Elvis Costello or David Bowie, and have not been highly experimental boundary-pushers. But Downie's writing changes in pretty fundamental ways almost from album to album, and the band's instrumental support has grown MUCH subtler and more emotionally complex, in my opinion, over the years. They really impressed me with NFPA with the way the lyrics, melodies, and musicianship all worked so seamlessly together to be mutually reinforcing. (Sure, that album didn't have the big, epic, magisterial tracks - except for the last one - but it had a lot of mature, potent little songs on it).

On the other side, you've got all those so-called 'fans' left over from the 1990s, who - far from feeling the Hip are static and unchanging - basically ignore or dismiss everything they've done since M@W because it doesn't sound enough like 'classic Hip.'

The Hip have fallen through the cracks: not experimentally 'cool' enough for critics, not static enough for the Classic Rock radio crowd. But I really appreciate the fact that they do indeed continue to make new and vital music that matures as they do. A songwriters, they very much remain living artists, well worth following in my book.