A Good Dog Is Lost ~ Canada`s 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Greatest Songs ~ Fifteenth Post

"A Time" - Statue of Ron Hynes by Morgan MacDonald on George Street, St. John's

I came to Ron Hynes ten years ago, very late in his career, long after the magnificent cheerfulness of The Wonderful Grand Band and Codco had been retired to DVD, after Sonny`s Dream had won him a national ear, and near the end of his output of immaculate solo albums, full of original songs which were by turns comic, literate, sentimental and hard-nosed. Sometimes all at once. 

I was booked to interview him after seeing his bio-documentary Man Of A Thousand Songs. In it, perhaps a bit too courageously, he unveiled himself as a raging but wistful abuser of all forms of humans and substances. I was terrified by the man I saw. I was meant to talk to him over the phone from Newfoundland, but he seemed totally disinterested in having a conversation that day, and not much was communicated. In later encounters he was much more hospitable, though still full of barbs and blades. 

I didn`t actually get to see him play til five years after, in a small Toronto club. I had by then found a few of his disks, but I had never heard A Good Dog Is Lost. It still stings my heart and stirs something I can`t even name when he says:

``Well I can, I can hardly believe,
That a picture of a puppy drawn with a crayon
Would get to a guy like me.``
Ron Hynes' daughter Lily was going on four when events led up to the creation of this ballad about a shih-tzu belonging to Cathy Jones, of CODCO and This Hour Has 22 Minutes who at the time lived just down the road from the Hynes home in St John's. Lily drew a poster to hang in the nearby store and Ron wrote this ballad. Ron has the love of a father in the tone of his singing, and this may have something to do with the overall effect of the recording, on Get Back Change (2003).

The artistry of the song, the stammering emotion, the characterizations, the puppy P.O.V. and...and...what he does at the end (no spoilers here) combine to set this song even a notch beyond his usual standard of concise excellence. When his ragged recent biography, the dirty posthumous footnotes, the monster from Man Of A Thousand Songs, maybe even Sonny`s Dream - God Forbid - have retired to the sidelines, anyone who chances upon this song will sigh, sob and say ``This man must have truly been a monarch of song.`

Rebecca Campbell contributed a live version of the song to one of my shows and we both held on for dear life that she could get through it dry-eyed. Here it is, so beautiful.


`

God Loves Everyone ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Greatest Songs ~ Fourteenth Post

Ron Sexsmith writes songs with a profound compassion and a rigor of description akin to the talents of great short story writers. The gregarious melodies that he hangs his words on lighten the impact of the simple truths with which he frequently pierces himself and his characters. 

Cobblestone Runway, Ron's sixth studio album, from 2002, contains some of his most sincere pathos and his most succinctly stated assertions of faith. Standing out from his musings on the nature of love is one hymn full of adoration for a universal spirituality. God Loves Everyone speaks of the oneness of a benevolent spirit. Only an enlightened Canadian could have written this song. It negates the dualities of European theology and mediates issues that trials and wars have forever raged over, historically and to this day.

Inspired by the brutal murder of gay Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, and galvanized by the intensity of personal heartbreak that Sexsmith had recently experienced, it makes a clear case for living in the confidence that you are the best judge of your own life, free of the fear of consequences from traditional paternalistic god/devil misbeliefs.

 A blessing by songcraft. Unconditionally.

* Ron Sexsmith will be singing with the T.S.O. at Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square on Canada Day

Brainwashed ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Greatest Songs ~ Thirteenth Post

Illustrator from Buenos Aires Al Markha 

Street fighting reform school grad David Clayton Thomas got his rewards later, after replacing Al Kooper in Blood Sweat & Tears, but he was already an  anti-authoritarian icon and an important musical innovator after his hit single with The Bossmen in Canada in 1966. On the a.m. radio, Brainwashed was censored with a significantly irritating beeeep at the point in the lyric where he roared "60 million people reading all about Viet Nam / 85 percent of them don't give a damn". 

Aggressive snare and guitar, combined with a frenzied bridge of jazz keyboard / bass, all of it mixed waaay into the red, gave the song instant status as a standout track of social change, paving the way for songs like Ohio and Black Day In July. A future of musical breakthroughs, Junos and Grammies followed, but this moment stands as a high-water mark of ferocious Canadian song-writing.

Shine ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Eleventh Post

Joni Mitchell ~ born Roberta Anderson, 7 November 1943 in Fort Macleod Alberta ~ has made songs, paintings and honest declarations of freedom (and bondage) all her life.

She has suffered abuse by the media and her peers and made her stand over all the shamers and blamers. She has titled her 19th and most recent album (2007) with her career's most accurately descriptive verb ~ Shine. 

In the title song, she comes out laughing at the stubbornness of dualistic thought, which has interfered with her at life's every turn. Her paintings and philosophic contributions have yet to be seriously appreciated. Best to encounter her in the music itself, or in Malka Marom's book Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words.

Pamphleteer ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Tenth Post

The songs of John K. Samson bleed out through the deliberate and epic patience of his band The Weakerthans. The songs render the listener progressively more and more helpless as the lyrics congeal into private articulations that make more sense to the feelings than to the mind. They have never had breakout success, although in 2005, Left and Leaving was named one of the ten best Canadian albums of all time in Chart magazine's reader poll.  The song Pamphleteer, from that epic second album, has an organic connection to Aside and My Favourite Chords and the title track, but stands above them, perhaps most for its noble Canadian stubbornness against “all that I could never overcome.” 

 Nowadays, the band is essentially broken up, although they claim to be merely “cryogenically frozen”.

It all sounds weird, I know, but that is because they are from Winnipeg, even more so than they are from Canada. Here is a summation from someone who has insightfully explained the significance of the band, and their special city, from an article in GEIST: http://www.geist.com/fact/essays/city-still-breathing-listening-weakerthans/

“ One of my favourite Weakerthans songs is about politics, or maybe about the limitations of politics. It’s called “Pamphleteer” and it’s written from the point of view of a weary, discontented activist standing on a street corner at rush hour, handing out leaflets. The song borrows nicely from the literature of the left; it ends with the line “A spectre’s haunting Albert Street,” echoing the first line of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe.” And it quotes from the protest hymn “Solidarity Forever,” like this:

Sing “Oh what force on earth could be
Weaker than the feeble strength
Of one” like me remembering
The way it could have been.

The quote is from “Solidarity Forever”— there’s a footnote in the lyric sheet that says so—but what I love about it is the way that the lyrics subvert the anthem, so that it’s no longer about political struggle but about lost love.” City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans by Paul Tough

Acadian Driftwood ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Ninth Post

Deportation Sculpture in Grand Pre in Nova Scotia

Burnished by Robbie Robertson's robust imagery and his flair for nuanced incident, 

The Band's Acadian Driftwood 

from 1975's Northern Lights Southern Cross LP presents an episodic insight into the historic disgrace known as the Expulsion of the Acadians.

"They signed a treaty and our homes were taken..."

  From 1755 onwards, Maritime French settlers were uprooted and forced from their land by Charles Lawrence and the British government because of their language and allegiances, transformed into refugees by a harsh political environment. 

"Loved ones forsaken, they didn't give a damn."

There was no claim to neutrality permitted: all were removed. Racial and religious motivations expedited British political and military goals. Roman Catholicism was unwelcome, and the Mi'kmaq alliance with the French needed to be dismantled as well.

The pathos of this epic song is enhanced by Byron Berline's haunting fiddle and Garth Hudson's synthesized military fifes, by the lyrical coda of nostalgic patois and by the retrospective knowledge that this would be the last great song produced by this country's most musically significant rock ensemble ever.

Rise Again ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Eighth Post

After years of local success, Cape Breton's Rankin Family spiked up from out of the cèilidh culture of Mabou, Nova Scotia in the early nineteen nineties. Under the guidance of elders John Morris and Raylene (now both deceased), siblings Cookie, Heather and Jimmy produced an unalloyed purity of heartfelt sound that sold half a million copies of Fare Thee Well Love for EMI in 1992. 

In the following year, a song by Leon Dubinsky, from Sydney, Nova Scotia, written for a 1984 stage musical titled The Rise and Follies of Cape Breton, was the lead single for their third release, North Country. Rise Again was a summons to resilience, regeneration and stubborn faith that spoke deeply to Cape Bretoners in the economic desperation of those days. 

The song was magnified out across the country by the CBC, becoming the #1 country album on RPM, and its spirit helped to buoy a populist backlash that decimated the neo-crapitalistic corporate cabal of Brian Mulroney and his party in the pivotal federal election of October 1993. Raylene's high A at the end of a chorus that had already modulated up a whole tone served as a clarion beam of determination that sealed the song's message. 

The success of The Rankins set the stage for topical Maritime songwriting by such artists as Lennie Gallant and Ron Hynes, and seeded a national audience for crystalline harmony trios like The Wailin' Jennys, The Ault Sisters, Good Lovelies and Trent Severn.

Wild Things ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Seventh Post

Wild Things takes over my heart every time I hear it: "Gather all the rebels now, we'll rebel-rouse and sing aloud."

I can't tell you how my spine tingles and my chin tightens up proud when I hear this Giant Canadian Song of today, and I think of just yesterday, Joni searching  the cellar in the Boho Zone and Leonard doing the telephone dance at the System Theatre and Burton onstage with a burning American flag and poor sick Joel Plaskett with the visions coming quicker, Deryck refusing to be another casualty of society, Brigette dePape...all our rebels, abjuring the empty chairs and policies that

Alessia Cara can so clearly see and just walk around, outside the trap, spiteless and safe in her undiminished sense of self-possession.  With great sound. Fine all by herself.

With her friends and fun intact. Bringing an international generation together, even in the comments jungle. What an invasion of healthy perspective, unique beats and a truly livid flood of blood-vivid phrasing and - and - and. *Find your grace.*

Barrett's Privateers ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Sixth Post

The story of Barrett`s Privateers and their fictitious ship with the ironic moniker, The Antelope, has borne innumerable keggers and bellow-fests around the world into the raptures of song with its dual refrain and lengthy narrative. Our national personality is expertly expressed through Stan Rogers` rollicking melody and delicious phrasing. The attention to detail and aloof sarcasm of the stoic narrator qualify him as an iconic Canadian Ishmael, a character fitted to the literary tradition of Robert Service or Yann Martel. The explicitly populist and pacifist nobility of his spirit is wagered and sacrificed against the promise / curse of American gold. Drawing from recent news, The Antelope might be a telling metaphor for our current ship of state.

Mystery ~ Canada's 150th Birthday ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Fifth Post

While I was reading Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (“an Everest among books”), part of the thrill was the chorus of an unseen space troubadour named, oddly enough, Bruce Cockburn. Then, decades later, he reappears in a redemptive novel, The Shack by William P. Young, as the favourite songwriter of a character named God. 

The pastoral poetry and guitar expertise of his early work was eclipsed by outspoken lyrical responses to politics, ecology and spirituality which were a life-line to Can-Consciousness throughout the seventies and eighties. Outspoken anthems such as It's Going Down Slow and If I Had A Rocket Launcher brought him honour, notoriety and governmental scrutiny.

His later work has not yielded any hits, but this song, Mystery, from 2006's Life Short Call Now has a determined  maturity of vision and mood that magnifies the complex imagery. Ron Sexsmith, Hawksley Workman and Damhnait Doyle contribute mighty passions to the harmony,

and a 27-piece string session ascends to lift the song into grace at the end.

Thank U ~ Canada's 150th Birthday This Year ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Fourth Post

By 1998, Alanis Morissette had already conquered the world with her fevered voice and her lyrical encouragement for a socially bewildered audience to take confidence in their own self-worth. After a sabbatical in India, she came back with Thank U, a trance-y three chord manifesto of honesty, co-written with producer Glen Ballard, that confirmed her spiritual rigor and her passion for self-revelation. The music repeatedly resolves to the awkward fourth chord, always leaving a need to move forward to a resolution that never fully arrives. The words are personal and universal simultaneously, invoking a refusal to accept easy answers and self indulgence as solutions to emptiness. Her work set the stage for the uncompromising stance of rebel Canadians Avril Lavigne, Tegan & Sara and The New Pornograhers' Neko Case.

Black Day In July ~ Canada's 150th Birthday This Year ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ Second Post

Gordon Lightfoot gets well-deserved acclaim for his strong suits in classic Canadiana (The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald & Canadian Railroad Trilogy), his love songs (If You Could Read My Mind & Pussywillows, Cattails) and his enduring bar-band standards (Sundown & Early Morning Rain), but the power of his scathing, percussive hit, Black Day In July, remains unique 

Strongly stung by the intensity and proximity of the 1967 Detroit riots, which lasted five days and caused unprecedented death and destruction, Lightfoot voiced the growing frustration that was igniting songwriters all over the free world as racism, poverty and the Tet offensive dominated the media. The song tracked strongly in Canada and the U.S., until it was pulled from airplay after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Its poetry is steeped in the blood and anger of Detroit, but continues to ask questions of Ferguson, Paris, and whatever tragedies next week's news may have in store.

Wavin' Flag ~ Canada's 150th Birthday This Year ~ Our 17 Best Songs ~ First Post

When I first started teaching, this was the go-to song for any singalong. All the kids knew all the lyrics, and this was the version they loved. Little Biebs and Drake, Avril & Deryk, Kardinal & Jully. Just shining for Haiti. Blessed pride and confidence prevail, specially delivered to a new day of music by K'naan.