It will ebb and flow, and when we emerge on the other side, slightly worse for wear, we will still have him. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it, and all. Or, as a contemporary of Gord Downie still sings so “full of grace”:īut the darkness, of course, is not eternal. Today, so poetic that Gord has faded with the last of our season’s dying embers, we prepare for the cold, biting winds and relentless chill to the early mornings/late nights, and what feels like – to us Canadians, at least – terminal darkness. It just wasn’t the same as it used to be. We’d visit a website from time to time, read a thing or two about someone, but it wasn’t the same because we were alone when we did this. Hip album covers, which were once so reverentially removed from the CD cover and read between friends, thick as thieves with this musical treatise in our hands, were bygone items replaced by screenshots and digital pics. We quit smoking, drank less, and only smoked pot at get-togethers preceded by “10th” or “20th” or “25th.” We worried about mortgages and sicknesses. We donned suits and ties, secured jobs and started families. That – not the current political climate – was all the proof we needed that something was awry not in Denmark, but across the 49th.Īnd then as we – and the Hip – grew older, we became more circumspect. How is there justice in this world if the Hip can’t be recognized for their talent and Gord Downie for his sheer brilliance? So why not The Tragically Hip? we asked on these now-fuzzy nights that memory has relegated to dark, hard-to-reach corners of our post-addled minds. He has returned to that eternal and ethereal place among the stars where the brightest among us shine in perpetuity.įor reasons so many of us contemplated on nights filled with loud music, excessive drinking and cloud-filled rooms, the Hip never made it big in the States like Alanis Morissette, Rush, Shania Twain, Justin Bieber, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne – the list goes on and on of Canadians who’ve made it mega-huge south of the border. Tributes and farewells and love letters will continue to pour in, but we will never have him again. Gord Downie, Canada’s rock-poet laureateĬanada is a nation in mourning. We should become a nation of poets rather than America-hater. “Poetry is a voice that characterizes a nation.

Gordon downie handwriting