roses, bruises, 'bout your shoulders (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theleaveswant) wrote2010-02-01 07:13 pm
theleaveswant) wrote2010-02-01 07:13 pm
you taste so bitter and so sweet
This might be my last or second-last post to this LJ that isn't cross-posted from Dreamwidth. I'm going to be shifting over soon, anyway; I just wanted to get this out of my saved drafts pile first.
You may or may not recall that on January 26th of last year I posted a meme promising to Make Stuff for anybody who commented. The one year time span has come and gone. I never forgot about it, though I did get thoroughly sidetracked several times. I still intend to fulfill my promises, as soon as I'm able; this is an update on my progress.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pyroclasticgrub: I think you already know I was knitting you a vest. I had mostly finished it this fall, then ran out of yarn, and because the yarn I'm using was thrifted and old and I don't know where it came from, I cannot buy more. I've tried it on (we have pretty similar circumferences, I think?) and there seems to be a lot of positive ease, so I'm going to try frogging and restarting it with fewer stitches. I have a few other projects with stricter time limits to finish first.
prairiedaun: I had a lot of trouble deciding what to do for you. You can do your own knitting and many other crafts, you're good at finding music, you cook and bake, I don't know what your current fandoms are. I settled on designing a hat in your honour. Not sure it's the kind of thing you'd wear, but I hope you'll enjoy the premise at least. I'll put the pattern on Ravelry when I'm done. I'll probably donate the first prototype as a raffle prize for a pet rescue fundraiser coming up in a couple of weeks in Ottawa.
johnnypurple: A mix! This one has actually been technically finished for ages, aside from some minor picking and poking. It's big (30 tracks) and maybe a little weird; it started with me looking for a theme to work around and deciding somewhat arbitrarily to use only Canadian artists, and then it mutated into this big thing about Canadian identity, or my experience of living in a country with A Certain Reputation and trying to reconcile (or not) my love for so many of the people and places and words and ideas and bits of art that get flagged "Canadian" (willingly or nay) or that entangle in the rhizomatic tendrils of my "Canadian" experiences, with all the things I hate about that Reputation and about the realities of actually living here (many of which, such as sabotaging climate talks in Copenhagen, sabotaging post-secondary funding especially for social science and humanities students, denying Canada's history of colonialism, denying Canada's abuse of Afghan detainees, and proroguing parliament AGAIN to avoid talking about this stuff at least until the fucking wasteful destructive celebration of nationalism known euphemistically as the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic games are over, can be credited to the Harper administration's reign of bullshit; others, like performing pelvic exams on unconscious surgery patients without our knowledge or consent are less new [this example is pretty new to public awareness] but still fucking GROSS). At different points the playlist was much longer (but I don't need to include songs from every Canadian artist I kinda like) or much more angrily political (but that's hijacking, and there are better fora); I've tried to tame it down to artists or tracks I'm really fond of right now and which I feel stand out in some particular way, and use the Canadian identity issues mostly as a substrate. I'm posting it for everybody to enjoy, although I do especially hope that you specifically, johnnypurple, find some tracks or artists really warm you (or cool you, or whatever you need most this week). My title for the project is "A Case of You".
*the geographic tags refer inconsistently to artists' places of birth, places of current residence, and publicly declared "hometown" affiliations; roughly, they're where I think of them as belonging (or claiming to).
1. Veda Hille (Vancouver, British Columbia), Lucklucky
here is where I did this, this is where I did that
it took thirty years to draw this map
and now what do you see? (you are blind blind blind)
the city or your map of the city?
Of course I start with Veda <3 It's a love letter to the ways we live cities, ways we write our stories in spaces and they write theirs in us. It's also a great "get up and go forth and DO SOMETHING on this bright sunny day" kind of song. The video is pretty nifty too, although I find Veda's shiny makeup and too-poised singing-to-playback somehow disquieting.
2. Kris Demeanor (Calgary, Alberta), Practice
with an eyebrow pencil from her makeup bag I drew a map of the world on my arm
told her to show me where she'd been; "nowhere, only here"
Vignette stories about five affairs in five different countries, under the influence of five different kinds of alcohol, and the reasons they didn't work. Musically repetitive, but some really exquisite lyrics.
3. Nathan (Winnipeg, Manitoba), Home With Me
I bet you have the kind of eyes crinkled up at the edges, a secret map
trails etched in skin, situations you've been in though it's never got quite this dramatic
Achingly beautiful little tune about the fine line between tragically romantic longing and stalkerish obsession.
4. Kim Barlow (Whitehorse, Yukon Territory), Humminah
the first time I saw Brian
he had moose blood all over his hands
I'd never loved a redneck hunter before
so I thought I would give it a try
Kim Barlow is a champion of clever, cock-eyed, heart-grabbing songs, especially about or flavoured by life in the geographic most of Canada, the North and the rural vastness between the major cities.
5. The Rheostatics feat. Sarah Harmer (Etobicoke & Burlington, ON), Loving Arms
it takes a trip, a step away from what you know
to see more clearly what otherwise you wouldn't know
I'm getting more critical about travel as world-consumption and all the twisty ways that privilege gets knotted up in that, but I'm still an anthropology student and I still believe that you need to poke your head out of the bubble of your own upbringing and find some diversity of experience in order to grow insight into both "your home" and "the world" and how they mutually in-form. Plus, I dare you not to feel at least a little bit happier after listening to this song than you did before.
6. Greg MacPherson (Winnipeg), Slow Stroke
she said "I wanna run away and I wanna see the world and I prob'ly never will
but I don't wanna know
some nights I could sink like a stone, look around me and completely understand
some night's I don't"
I picked this tune because bits of it resonate so fiercely with my own experience (I am a sister in Toronto! I've got an old man in call-me-when-you're-drunk-B.C.! . . . that's about it, for the things that don't require an essay to narrate). It's kind of a punch-in-the-gut, fight or flight track, or at least that's how it affects me. Also GMac is an INTENSE live performer. I think he has a black belt in rocking out.
7. Wendy McNeill (Edmonton, AB), Restless
nothing like a belly full of stitches to let you know you're alive
nothing like the leash of limitation to make you wanna try
Wendy is one of the reasons I want to learn the accordion. I think her songwriting is kind of patchy (of the three albums of hers I've heard, I like about one album's worth of songs), but when she is on she is ON.
8. Geoff Berner with Wayne Adams and Diona Davies (Vancouver), And Promises to Break Before I Sleep
I'm so used to this nightmare that I'm frightened to awake
I've got miles to go and lots of promises to break
Another reason to learn the accordion. Berner has the kind of passionate twisted soul that makes a deliciously sharp satirist--see also his contender for Official Theme Song of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
9.Gentleman Reg (Toronto, ON), Give Me The Chance To Fall
sunshine
you
that smile
my aching chest
Another sweet sunny-day song, this one about the sweet ache of being in crush. It plays over the titles in Wilby Wonderful, which is a fabulous movie that everyone should see.
10. The Fugitives (Vancouver), This poem is gay, ie Awesome
I promise to be the gayest prime minister this country has ever seen!
Greedy Fugitives, taking up two spots on the list! But the one below is more of a song and this one is all spoken word, so I guess it's okay. Here Barbara, Brendan and Mark find funny in headdeskingly absurd homophobic rhetoric, natural disasters, the power of language, and lexical reclamation (isn't that gay?).
11. Dead Man's Bones (Los Angeles, California, Not Canada), My Body's a Zombie for You
the size of the eyes and the flies in the sky
make it hard to see to the end
Ryan Gosling is Canadian, even if the band as a sum are not, and it's just such a fun project! This track is especially sweet and silly and it encourages kids to spell (although they're mispronouncing "zed" :P ).
12. Captain Tractor (Edmonton), Turned Around
I got used to this town
became a part of me and I a part of its militant crowd
Kind of a counterpoint to Lucklucky, insofar as it speaks to dis-placement, dis-orientation, becoming alien in a world you thought was home. Captain Tractor are just about the most "Canadian"-sounding band I can think of; occasionally beautiful, but also deeply Bob and Doug (this track's off an album called Hoserista, eh?).
13. Tagaq (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), Qimiruluapik
Tanya Tagaq Gillis is an Inuit woman who (so the story goes) got homesick for Nunavut while at university in Nova Scotia, and practiced throat singing (traditionally done with a human partner) along with ethnographic recordings from the library. Now she uses various technological mediations in crafting kind of a solo style. If you get a chance to see her live, take it. It's a viscerally animating experience, and fascinating to watch what she does playing up and subverting tropes of "primal", "tribal", colonial narratives of the frozen-in-time North, etc.
14. The Weakerthans (Winnipeg), Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)
light failing over the pole as every longitude leads
up to your frostbitten feet, oh you're very sweet
Aw! How can you not love a song about a somewhat-dotty Antarctic explorer going on a date with Papa Michel? <3 <3 <3
15. Hey Rosetta! (St. John's, Newfoundland), New Goodbye
but I believe if we run into red full-speed
then there isn't a blade beneath keen enough to pierce our skins
I anticipate big things for Hey Rosetta!. This album, Into Your Lungs (And Around In Your Heart And On Through Your Blood), is my current favourite going-to-the-gym soundtrack. The lyrical crests of joy and troughs of despair balance out to a cautious optimism, and I find the big arrangements really energizing. Plus of all the stringed instruments I love, I love cellos most.
16. Joni Mitchell (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), A Case of You
just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as the northern star
and I said, constantly in the darkness!
where's that at? if you want me I'll be in the bar
Oh look, it's the playlist's title track! I didn't want to fill it up with internationally famous acts, but this song (and many of Joni's others from the same era--Blue is such a stunning record) is just so incredibly beautiful I couldn't leave it out.
17. Stan Rogers (Hamilton), Free in the Harbour
free in the harbour, untroubled by comings and goings of men
who once did pursue them as oil from the sea (hauling away, hauling away)
now they're Calgary roughnecks from Hermitage Bay
where the whales make free in the harbour
A bizarre product of this age of mechanical reproduction: Stan Rogers died almost two years before I was born, and yet his voice has been part of my musical environment all of my life. I chose this song partly because of an experience I had this summer, hanging out with my friend and classmate N and her anarchist folk musician friends in Hamilton. We were all sitting around in a living room singing Stan Rogers songs and when we got to the line about Portage and Main in this one I did a little fist-pump and then had to explain to the Ontarians that it's an intersection in Winnipeg, ostensibly the coldest and windiest in Canada. That's my hometown pride. Also because the westward migration the song talks about is still going on, and it's tied up in so much of the economic and political activity Canada participates in today. I remember at the Canmore Folk Festival some years ago hearing some real hippie-dippie singer-songwriter from B.C.'s Sunshine Coast playing this song all happy-like (yay! the whales are frolicking!) and in retrospect I think she must have rewritten the verses because there's no way anyone who's actually listened to the words could misinterpret the wryness: the whales aren't making free because humans became suddenly enlightened and decided to stop hunting them and now every environmental problem is solved hooray, they're doing it because the humans are all leaving the Maritimes for Alberta to work in the oil industry, leaving fewer boats in the harbour to smash into, and they stopped hunting because whaling stopped being economically viable when the humans effectively ran out of whales and cod and everything else they used to depend on. It's really not a happy song, is what I'm saying.
18. Stephen Fearing (Guelph, ON), Expectations
and what did I want from you?
I reached, left myself unprotected
set my sights so high and I expected
isn't that what fools and little kids should never do?
what else could I expect from you?
Fearing's is another voice I've been listening to just about all my life. "The Longest Road" might have been a more thematically on-the-nose song choice, as it is about leaving Canada as a child and returning as an adult, but I like this one better. Pretty sure that's Sarah McLachlan on backing vocals.
19. The Cowboy Junkies (Toronto), Sun Comes up, It's Tuesday Morning
yeah sure I'll admit there are times when I miss you
'specially like now when I need someone to hold me
but there are some things which can never be forgiven
and I just gotta tell you that I sure do like this extra few feet in my bed
The Cowboy Junkies have a real gift for succinctly capturing beauty and atrocity in banal details, plus this is a perfect "I guess I didn't need you anyway" post-breakup song.
20. Justin Rutledge (Toronto), The Suffering Of Pepe O'Malley [Pt. III]
dear Emily, I am a gargoyle carver from Florence, Italy
sometimes the chisel slips and I forget your melody
but you'll always be my dear Emily
I only really like a handful of Rutledge's songs (that I've heard); this is one of them. I don't really know what to say about it except that I think it's wonderful.
21. Weeping Tile (Kingston, Ontario), South of Me
south of me, how've you been?
I wish I'd touched the back of your knee up there on the balcony
where did it start, magnet heart?
when we met in the liquid state, a place to drink in the dark
I like Sarah Harmer's solo stuff a lot, at least the first couple of albums (haven't been keeping up with her recently), but I like Weeping Tile more. I dedicate this song to someone in Winnipeg whom I haven't talked to in a while but still care about, and I'm not saying who.
22. Elliott Brood (Toronto), Write It All Down For You
And why, why would you kill this world my son?
And why, why would you leave it all for none
But the world, well it stands beneath your scars
Elliott Brood are a band and a made-up person. A lot of their songs sound pretty similar and the lyrics often aren't easy to decipher, but they're really fun. Especially live, when they run around in funeral director-black suits and sock feet and pass lanterns through the audience.
23. Sarah Slean (Toronto), Me & Jerome
I asked him why he disappeared so suddenly
he said "I ran away before they made a movie outta me"
I haven't been keeping up with Sarah Slean since her album Day One. Now that I've reminded myself how much I like her style I may have to do something about that.
24. Christine Fellows (Winnipeg), Veda's Waltz
it's not too late for the battle-scarred
stranger homes for a stranger's heart
I think Christine has more songs that do contain birds than songs that don't. It's part of why I like her. The quote "and it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. If a bird with a broken neck can fly away" is from The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (which I have not read).
25. Bruce Cockburn (Ottawa, ON), Rumours of Glory
smiles mixed with curses
the crowd disperses
about whom no details are known
each one alone yet not alone
More music I grew up with. This one's pretty chill, and less cynical than a lot of Bruce's familiar material. This track and the last one, and I suppose the next two, are songs that make me feel like things might actually be alright, at least for/in a while.
26. Po Girl (Vancouver), How the Poet Goes
we might as well lift up the glass
we might as well rejoice in random chance
and take our pleasure while we can
'cause we'll be gone real soon
Oh my gosh Allison Russell and Awna Teixeira each have such incredible voices.
27. The Fugitives (Vancouver), French Tattoo
I'll accept your hotel-like disposition if you stay all night and check out late
I'll gladly be your highway town
but if my bedsheets tangle all around you and between them and me you decide to stay?
I'll put aside your favourite room
I'm running out of ways to say "it's pretty", but this one really is. Each of Barbara's, Mark's, Brendan's, and guest vocalist Archie Pateman's contributions (when I've seen them live, Mark has sung the last) are each so rich, and so beautiful. Exquisite collaboration, and as I read that last verse at least as a smile towards devoted but non-possessive love if not explicit polyamory.
28. The New Pornographers (Vancouver), Use It
heads down, thumbs up
two sips from the cup of human kindness and I'm shit-faced
just laid to waste
I had to sneak Neko Case in here somehow! Plus this is the title track for The Hour (or was when I last saw it), a current affairs-and-stuff show which I might actually watch if I had cable (and not just because Stroumbo is a cutie and frequently refers to people including himself as "your boyfriend"). Actually, hang on: yes, it is available streaming on the CBC website. Cool beans.
29. Spirit of the West with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (Vancouver), Political
you let me out to run across your world
I ran into a wall, you told me I built it then you'd
reel me in, ream me out, pick me up, push me out again
and then repeat it
I love Spirit of the West, so much. They're another group I grew up with. I can't say enough good things about them. John Mann, the lead vocalist on this and many other tracks, is an actor too, mostly day-playing on filmed-in-B.C. American TV (he was the CAG in the Battlestar Galactica pilot; he got blowed up in the attack on the Colonies).
30. The Wet Spots (Vancouver), Toes
the door is shut, the way is closed
what don't you get? I think it's gross
I'm indisposed--don't lick my toes!
Cass King and John Woods, aka the Wet Spots, are a kinky poly queer married musical sex education and comedy duo, which pretty much makes them the coolest people in the world. I feel I ought to clarify, or maybe even defend, since it may not necessarily be clear from the song itself: it's not supposed to be an anti-shrimping song. I don't want to presume the attitudes towards shrimping of anybody who reads this, and neither I nor the Wet Spots want you to feel bad about enjoying it--hooray for toe-sucking! Rather, this song is about limits, and I agree with the Wet Spots that thinking about your limits and communicating them to your partners are good things (like, keeping toe-sucking as the example, I have self-consciousness issues around my feet so it's not high on my list, but it's not a no-way-never hard limit). The story behind the song, as they told it at the Renegade opening "gala" in November, is that the first time they went home together John tried it on Cass and it squicked her out, so he wrote her the song as a present/apology and played it for her on their next date (everybody say "awww"). So yeah, feel good about your thing, whatever your thing is; try new things to see if maybe they are your thing; and don't feel shy about telling your partner if they're not :)
ETA: BONUS TRACK! This totally should have been on the list, except that I hadn't listened to the album all the way through before I posted:
The Cliks (Toronto), We Are The Wolverines
We all come from the wheel and fire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Burning in your heart's desire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Because the Cliks are awesome and Lucas Silveira is a rock'n'roll god in the ascendant phase. Because Wolverine is a strange kind of Canadian icon even when he's played by an Australian in American movies (comic books do weird things to geography--cities, worlds, bodies, plausibilities). Because the first year I volunteered at the Winnipeg Folk Festival I had a conversation with Billy fucking Bragg about how he hadn't been a very good goatherd (no joke) and he hypothesized that in Canada wolverines would be the dominant menace re: disinterring livestock, rather than foxes which were the problem where he'd worked (they're not). Because the wolverine at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg is a total camwhore. Because the song is sexy and somehow inspiring even if I'm not sure I quite get it. Wolverines!
You may or may not recall that on January 26th of last year I posted a meme promising to Make Stuff for anybody who commented. The one year time span has come and gone. I never forgot about it, though I did get thoroughly sidetracked several times. I still intend to fulfill my promises, as soon as I'm able; this is an update on my progress.
pyroclasticgrub: I think you already know I was knitting you a vest. I had mostly finished it this fall, then ran out of yarn, and because the yarn I'm using was thrifted and old and I don't know where it came from, I cannot buy more. I've tried it on (we have pretty similar circumferences, I think?) and there seems to be a lot of positive ease, so I'm going to try frogging and restarting it with fewer stitches. I have a few other projects with stricter time limits to finish first.prairiedaun: I had a lot of trouble deciding what to do for you. You can do your own knitting and many other crafts, you're good at finding music, you cook and bake, I don't know what your current fandoms are. I settled on designing a hat in your honour. Not sure it's the kind of thing you'd wear, but I hope you'll enjoy the premise at least. I'll put the pattern on Ravelry when I'm done. I'll probably donate the first prototype as a raffle prize for a pet rescue fundraiser coming up in a couple of weeks in Ottawa.johnnypurple: A mix! This one has actually been technically finished for ages, aside from some minor picking and poking. It's big (30 tracks) and maybe a little weird; it started with me looking for a theme to work around and deciding somewhat arbitrarily to use only Canadian artists, and then it mutated into this big thing about Canadian identity, or my experience of living in a country with A Certain Reputation and trying to reconcile (or not) my love for so many of the people and places and words and ideas and bits of art that get flagged "Canadian" (willingly or nay) or that entangle in the rhizomatic tendrils of my "Canadian" experiences, with all the things I hate about that Reputation and about the realities of actually living here (many of which, such as sabotaging climate talks in Copenhagen, sabotaging post-secondary funding especially for social science and humanities students, denying Canada's history of colonialism, denying Canada's abuse of Afghan detainees, and proroguing parliament AGAIN to avoid talking about this stuff at least until the fucking wasteful destructive celebration of nationalism known euphemistically as the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic games are over, can be credited to the Harper administration's reign of bullshit; others, like performing pelvic exams on unconscious surgery patients without our knowledge or consent are less new [this example is pretty new to public awareness] but still fucking GROSS). At different points the playlist was much longer (but I don't need to include songs from every Canadian artist I kinda like) or much more angrily political (but that's hijacking, and there are better fora); I've tried to tame it down to artists or tracks I'm really fond of right now and which I feel stand out in some particular way, and use the Canadian identity issues mostly as a substrate. I'm posting it for everybody to enjoy, although I do especially hope that you specifically, johnnypurple, find some tracks or artists really warm you (or cool you, or whatever you need most this week). My title for the project is "A Case of You". *the geographic tags refer inconsistently to artists' places of birth, places of current residence, and publicly declared "hometown" affiliations; roughly, they're where I think of them as belonging (or claiming to).
1. Veda Hille (Vancouver, British Columbia), Lucklucky
here is where I did this, this is where I did that
it took thirty years to draw this map
and now what do you see? (you are blind blind blind)
the city or your map of the city?
Of course I start with Veda <3 It's a love letter to the ways we live cities, ways we write our stories in spaces and they write theirs in us. It's also a great "get up and go forth and DO SOMETHING on this bright sunny day" kind of song. The video is pretty nifty too, although I find Veda's shiny makeup and too-poised singing-to-playback somehow disquieting.
2. Kris Demeanor (Calgary, Alberta), Practice
with an eyebrow pencil from her makeup bag I drew a map of the world on my arm
told her to show me where she'd been; "nowhere, only here"
Vignette stories about five affairs in five different countries, under the influence of five different kinds of alcohol, and the reasons they didn't work. Musically repetitive, but some really exquisite lyrics.
3. Nathan (Winnipeg, Manitoba), Home With Me
I bet you have the kind of eyes crinkled up at the edges, a secret map
trails etched in skin, situations you've been in though it's never got quite this dramatic
Achingly beautiful little tune about the fine line between tragically romantic longing and stalkerish obsession.
4. Kim Barlow (Whitehorse, Yukon Territory), Humminah
the first time I saw Brian
he had moose blood all over his hands
I'd never loved a redneck hunter before
so I thought I would give it a try
Kim Barlow is a champion of clever, cock-eyed, heart-grabbing songs, especially about or flavoured by life in the geographic most of Canada, the North and the rural vastness between the major cities.
5. The Rheostatics feat. Sarah Harmer (Etobicoke & Burlington, ON), Loving Arms
it takes a trip, a step away from what you know
to see more clearly what otherwise you wouldn't know
I'm getting more critical about travel as world-consumption and all the twisty ways that privilege gets knotted up in that, but I'm still an anthropology student and I still believe that you need to poke your head out of the bubble of your own upbringing and find some diversity of experience in order to grow insight into both "your home" and "the world" and how they mutually in-form. Plus, I dare you not to feel at least a little bit happier after listening to this song than you did before.
6. Greg MacPherson (Winnipeg), Slow Stroke
she said "I wanna run away and I wanna see the world and I prob'ly never will
but I don't wanna know
some nights I could sink like a stone, look around me and completely understand
some night's I don't"
I picked this tune because bits of it resonate so fiercely with my own experience (I am a sister in Toronto! I've got an old man in call-me-when-you're-drunk-B.C.! . . . that's about it, for the things that don't require an essay to narrate). It's kind of a punch-in-the-gut, fight or flight track, or at least that's how it affects me. Also GMac is an INTENSE live performer. I think he has a black belt in rocking out.
7. Wendy McNeill (Edmonton, AB), Restless
nothing like a belly full of stitches to let you know you're alive
nothing like the leash of limitation to make you wanna try
Wendy is one of the reasons I want to learn the accordion. I think her songwriting is kind of patchy (of the three albums of hers I've heard, I like about one album's worth of songs), but when she is on she is ON.
8. Geoff Berner with Wayne Adams and Diona Davies (Vancouver), And Promises to Break Before I Sleep
I'm so used to this nightmare that I'm frightened to awake
I've got miles to go and lots of promises to break
Another reason to learn the accordion. Berner has the kind of passionate twisted soul that makes a deliciously sharp satirist--see also his contender for Official Theme Song of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
9.Gentleman Reg (Toronto, ON), Give Me The Chance To Fall
sunshine
you
that smile
my aching chest
Another sweet sunny-day song, this one about the sweet ache of being in crush. It plays over the titles in Wilby Wonderful, which is a fabulous movie that everyone should see.
10. The Fugitives (Vancouver), This poem is gay, ie Awesome
I promise to be the gayest prime minister this country has ever seen!
Greedy Fugitives, taking up two spots on the list! But the one below is more of a song and this one is all spoken word, so I guess it's okay. Here Barbara, Brendan and Mark find funny in headdeskingly absurd homophobic rhetoric, natural disasters, the power of language, and lexical reclamation (isn't that gay?).
11. Dead Man's Bones (Los Angeles, California, Not Canada), My Body's a Zombie for You
the size of the eyes and the flies in the sky
make it hard to see to the end
Ryan Gosling is Canadian, even if the band as a sum are not, and it's just such a fun project! This track is especially sweet and silly and it encourages kids to spell (although they're mispronouncing "zed" :P ).
12. Captain Tractor (Edmonton), Turned Around
I got used to this town
became a part of me and I a part of its militant crowd
Kind of a counterpoint to Lucklucky, insofar as it speaks to dis-placement, dis-orientation, becoming alien in a world you thought was home. Captain Tractor are just about the most "Canadian"-sounding band I can think of; occasionally beautiful, but also deeply Bob and Doug (this track's off an album called Hoserista, eh?).
13. Tagaq (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), Qimiruluapik
Tanya Tagaq Gillis is an Inuit woman who (so the story goes) got homesick for Nunavut while at university in Nova Scotia, and practiced throat singing (traditionally done with a human partner) along with ethnographic recordings from the library. Now she uses various technological mediations in crafting kind of a solo style. If you get a chance to see her live, take it. It's a viscerally animating experience, and fascinating to watch what she does playing up and subverting tropes of "primal", "tribal", colonial narratives of the frozen-in-time North, etc.
14. The Weakerthans (Winnipeg), Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)
light failing over the pole as every longitude leads
up to your frostbitten feet, oh you're very sweet
Aw! How can you not love a song about a somewhat-dotty Antarctic explorer going on a date with Papa Michel? <3 <3 <3
15. Hey Rosetta! (St. John's, Newfoundland), New Goodbye
but I believe if we run into red full-speed
then there isn't a blade beneath keen enough to pierce our skins
I anticipate big things for Hey Rosetta!. This album, Into Your Lungs (And Around In Your Heart And On Through Your Blood), is my current favourite going-to-the-gym soundtrack. The lyrical crests of joy and troughs of despair balance out to a cautious optimism, and I find the big arrangements really energizing. Plus of all the stringed instruments I love, I love cellos most.
16. Joni Mitchell (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), A Case of You
just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as the northern star
and I said, constantly in the darkness!
where's that at? if you want me I'll be in the bar
Oh look, it's the playlist's title track! I didn't want to fill it up with internationally famous acts, but this song (and many of Joni's others from the same era--Blue is such a stunning record) is just so incredibly beautiful I couldn't leave it out.
17. Stan Rogers (Hamilton), Free in the Harbour
free in the harbour, untroubled by comings and goings of men
who once did pursue them as oil from the sea (hauling away, hauling away)
now they're Calgary roughnecks from Hermitage Bay
where the whales make free in the harbour
A bizarre product of this age of mechanical reproduction: Stan Rogers died almost two years before I was born, and yet his voice has been part of my musical environment all of my life. I chose this song partly because of an experience I had this summer, hanging out with my friend and classmate N and her anarchist folk musician friends in Hamilton. We were all sitting around in a living room singing Stan Rogers songs and when we got to the line about Portage and Main in this one I did a little fist-pump and then had to explain to the Ontarians that it's an intersection in Winnipeg, ostensibly the coldest and windiest in Canada. That's my hometown pride. Also because the westward migration the song talks about is still going on, and it's tied up in so much of the economic and political activity Canada participates in today. I remember at the Canmore Folk Festival some years ago hearing some real hippie-dippie singer-songwriter from B.C.'s Sunshine Coast playing this song all happy-like (yay! the whales are frolicking!) and in retrospect I think she must have rewritten the verses because there's no way anyone who's actually listened to the words could misinterpret the wryness: the whales aren't making free because humans became suddenly enlightened and decided to stop hunting them and now every environmental problem is solved hooray, they're doing it because the humans are all leaving the Maritimes for Alberta to work in the oil industry, leaving fewer boats in the harbour to smash into, and they stopped hunting because whaling stopped being economically viable when the humans effectively ran out of whales and cod and everything else they used to depend on. It's really not a happy song, is what I'm saying.
18. Stephen Fearing (Guelph, ON), Expectations
and what did I want from you?
I reached, left myself unprotected
set my sights so high and I expected
isn't that what fools and little kids should never do?
what else could I expect from you?
Fearing's is another voice I've been listening to just about all my life. "The Longest Road" might have been a more thematically on-the-nose song choice, as it is about leaving Canada as a child and returning as an adult, but I like this one better. Pretty sure that's Sarah McLachlan on backing vocals.
19. The Cowboy Junkies (Toronto), Sun Comes up, It's Tuesday Morning
yeah sure I'll admit there are times when I miss you
'specially like now when I need someone to hold me
but there are some things which can never be forgiven
and I just gotta tell you that I sure do like this extra few feet in my bed
The Cowboy Junkies have a real gift for succinctly capturing beauty and atrocity in banal details, plus this is a perfect "I guess I didn't need you anyway" post-breakup song.
20. Justin Rutledge (Toronto), The Suffering Of Pepe O'Malley [Pt. III]
dear Emily, I am a gargoyle carver from Florence, Italy
sometimes the chisel slips and I forget your melody
but you'll always be my dear Emily
I only really like a handful of Rutledge's songs (that I've heard); this is one of them. I don't really know what to say about it except that I think it's wonderful.
21. Weeping Tile (Kingston, Ontario), South of Me
south of me, how've you been?
I wish I'd touched the back of your knee up there on the balcony
where did it start, magnet heart?
when we met in the liquid state, a place to drink in the dark
I like Sarah Harmer's solo stuff a lot, at least the first couple of albums (haven't been keeping up with her recently), but I like Weeping Tile more. I dedicate this song to someone in Winnipeg whom I haven't talked to in a while but still care about, and I'm not saying who.
22. Elliott Brood (Toronto), Write It All Down For You
And why, why would you kill this world my son?
And why, why would you leave it all for none
But the world, well it stands beneath your scars
Elliott Brood are a band and a made-up person. A lot of their songs sound pretty similar and the lyrics often aren't easy to decipher, but they're really fun. Especially live, when they run around in funeral director-black suits and sock feet and pass lanterns through the audience.
23. Sarah Slean (Toronto), Me & Jerome
I asked him why he disappeared so suddenly
he said "I ran away before they made a movie outta me"
I haven't been keeping up with Sarah Slean since her album Day One. Now that I've reminded myself how much I like her style I may have to do something about that.
24. Christine Fellows (Winnipeg), Veda's Waltz
it's not too late for the battle-scarred
stranger homes for a stranger's heart
I think Christine has more songs that do contain birds than songs that don't. It's part of why I like her. The quote "and it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. If a bird with a broken neck can fly away" is from The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (which I have not read).
25. Bruce Cockburn (Ottawa, ON), Rumours of Glory
smiles mixed with curses
the crowd disperses
about whom no details are known
each one alone yet not alone
More music I grew up with. This one's pretty chill, and less cynical than a lot of Bruce's familiar material. This track and the last one, and I suppose the next two, are songs that make me feel like things might actually be alright, at least for/in a while.
26. Po Girl (Vancouver), How the Poet Goes
we might as well lift up the glass
we might as well rejoice in random chance
and take our pleasure while we can
'cause we'll be gone real soon
Oh my gosh Allison Russell and Awna Teixeira each have such incredible voices.
27. The Fugitives (Vancouver), French Tattoo
I'll accept your hotel-like disposition if you stay all night and check out late
I'll gladly be your highway town
but if my bedsheets tangle all around you and between them and me you decide to stay?
I'll put aside your favourite room
I'm running out of ways to say "it's pretty", but this one really is. Each of Barbara's, Mark's, Brendan's, and guest vocalist Archie Pateman's contributions (when I've seen them live, Mark has sung the last) are each so rich, and so beautiful. Exquisite collaboration, and as I read that last verse at least as a smile towards devoted but non-possessive love if not explicit polyamory.
28. The New Pornographers (Vancouver), Use It
heads down, thumbs up
two sips from the cup of human kindness and I'm shit-faced
just laid to waste
I had to sneak Neko Case in here somehow! Plus this is the title track for The Hour (or was when I last saw it), a current affairs-and-stuff show which I might actually watch if I had cable (and not just because Stroumbo is a cutie and frequently refers to people including himself as "your boyfriend"). Actually, hang on: yes, it is available streaming on the CBC website. Cool beans.
29. Spirit of the West with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (Vancouver), Political
you let me out to run across your world
I ran into a wall, you told me I built it then you'd
reel me in, ream me out, pick me up, push me out again
and then repeat it
I love Spirit of the West, so much. They're another group I grew up with. I can't say enough good things about them. John Mann, the lead vocalist on this and many other tracks, is an actor too, mostly day-playing on filmed-in-B.C. American TV (he was the CAG in the Battlestar Galactica pilot; he got blowed up in the attack on the Colonies).
30. The Wet Spots (Vancouver), Toes
the door is shut, the way is closed
what don't you get? I think it's gross
I'm indisposed--don't lick my toes!
Cass King and John Woods, aka the Wet Spots, are a kinky poly queer married musical sex education and comedy duo, which pretty much makes them the coolest people in the world. I feel I ought to clarify, or maybe even defend, since it may not necessarily be clear from the song itself: it's not supposed to be an anti-shrimping song. I don't want to presume the attitudes towards shrimping of anybody who reads this, and neither I nor the Wet Spots want you to feel bad about enjoying it--hooray for toe-sucking! Rather, this song is about limits, and I agree with the Wet Spots that thinking about your limits and communicating them to your partners are good things (like, keeping toe-sucking as the example, I have self-consciousness issues around my feet so it's not high on my list, but it's not a no-way-never hard limit). The story behind the song, as they told it at the Renegade opening "gala" in November, is that the first time they went home together John tried it on Cass and it squicked her out, so he wrote her the song as a present/apology and played it for her on their next date (everybody say "awww"). So yeah, feel good about your thing, whatever your thing is; try new things to see if maybe they are your thing; and don't feel shy about telling your partner if they're not :)
ETA: BONUS TRACK! This totally should have been on the list, except that I hadn't listened to the album all the way through before I posted:
The Cliks (Toronto), We Are The Wolverines
We all come from the wheel and fire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Burning in your heart's desire
We are, we are, we are the wolverines
Because the Cliks are awesome and Lucas Silveira is a rock'n'roll god in the ascendant phase. Because Wolverine is a strange kind of Canadian icon even when he's played by an Australian in American movies (comic books do weird things to geography--cities, worlds, bodies, plausibilities). Because the first year I volunteered at the Winnipeg Folk Festival I had a conversation with Billy fucking Bragg about how he hadn't been a very good goatherd (no joke) and he hypothesized that in Canada wolverines would be the dominant menace re: disinterring livestock, rather than foxes which were the problem where he'd worked (they're not). Because the wolverine at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg is a total camwhore. Because the song is sexy and somehow inspiring even if I'm not sure I quite get it. Wolverines!