‘Intimate, inaccurate, a family, in a way / We made the trip to Vulnerable and back / On the same day’ This little phrase sums up the unrelenting hopefulness and optimism of Downie’s worldview almost perfectly: though our lives are provisional and often painful (“as makeshift as we are”), the best existential answer is to marvel and celebrate the fact that “we still are.” “Ain’t life a grand,” Downie sings in “World Container,” “I’m in awe of your awe,” and the same could be said by thousands of appreciative fans about Downie himself. The quotation above isn’t exactly a lyric, but the way that Downie introduced the song “As Makeshift As We Are” during the 2004 That Night in Toronto show.
#GORDON DOWNIE FULL#
Downie wanted to give people hope, to help them look on the bright side, to see that – even when things get dark – the world is full of beauty and blessings. Rather, by suggesting that Downie wanted to save people I mean something more mundane but nonetheless valuable (and surely enabled at least by common grace). Let me be explicitly clear that I am not talking about salvation in the transcendental sense made available exclusively through Christ. While it’s understandable to suggest that Downie was trying to save the nation, at heart his concern was for people.
There is nothing compulsive or chauvinistic in Downie’s observational nationalism, and the poetry with which he gave recognizable pieces of Canada back to us made it all the more memorable and resonant.
#GORDON DOWNIE HOW TO#
By covering an array of shared iconic moments and local particulars such as the one quoted above, Downie gave us both permission and a template for how to celebrate Canada in an ostensibly post-national age. It also showcases his attention to the particulars of place, in this case the waters off Isle Aux Morts, Newfoundland, where “The desultory sea grew more so through the night / And made one think of tawny ports / And aspen tremblin’ in tomorrow’s thorough light.” Much of the commentary on Downie’s work has focussed on its Canadianness, and this is not inappropriate. It exhibits Downie’s interest in heightened experiences, when everything else recedes beneath the immediacy of some particular moment. This line is from “The Dire Wolf,” a song about a rough channel crossing during a storm at sea. In this brief remembrance, however, I’d like to take a somewhat different angle and try to sum up Downie’s poetic ethos using just a few of his own words. Downie’s courageous last days have been well documented, and his career widely celebrated – including by two earlier articles in the pages of Christian Courier. In October, a little more than a year after he and his bandmates captivated Canadians with a dramatic final farewell cross-country tour, Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, passed away from a rare form of brain cancer.
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