Hey, it's jD here, and I'm writing this eleven days after standing in Springer Market Square in Kingston, surrounded by people I know by their screen names, watching it end all over again.
More on that at the bottom. It's the most personal thing I've put in this letter, and I sat on it a week before deciding you'd earned it.
Up top, though, September is good news, and I don't often get to say that.
TL;DR
• The Tragically Hip go into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame on September 26 at Massey Hall. • GEDfest Toronto is SOLD OUT. As of Sunday the 23rd there is not a ticket left. • 40 Hours Over added, opening for Grace 2. Prizes all night, and I've got a pair to give away. • Dave from Edmonton's 128-song bracket is into round four and getting vicious. • On Shuffle is back on Wednesdays, and the panelist form is open for September and October. • A four-part GEDfest series this fall: Past, Present, Future, and Secret Sauce. • Two episodes recapped: 'Tiger The Lion' and Ottawa, August 18, 2016. • September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. • "Up To Here" turns 37 and "Day For Night" turns 32. • August 20, 2016. I was on my couch. That's the whole memory I had.
The First Verse
We spent the summer walking through the final tour. A goodbye date by date, each night told by the people who were in the room. I loved it and I'm also, I'll admit, a little wrung out by it.
So the timing here is almost too good. September isn't the anniversary of a loss. September is a room in Toronto where people stand up and say out loud what we've been saying to each other in a Facebook group for a decade.
Let's get into it.
THE SONGWRITERS HALL
On Saturday, September 26, The Tragically Hip are inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame at Massey Hall in Toronto.
They go in alongside Leslie Feist, Roch Voisine, and Mike Reno and Paul Dean of Loverboy. George Stroumboulopoulos and Marie-Mai host. Performers announced so far run City and Colour, FINNEAS, Our Lady Peace, Jeff Tweedy, Amanda Marshall, Allison Russell, and Isabelle Boulay. Bruce McCulloch, Jay Baruchel, and Jim Vallance are among the inductors.
I don't know yet if a Hip song get played, or who plays it, or which members are even in the building. Nobody has said. When I know, you'll know.
Here's why this one lands differently for me. A songwriters hall isn't a popularity contest or a sales chart. It's a room full of people whose whole job is words and music saying these words and this music mattered. We've argued for thirty years that Gord was one of the great Canadian writers full stop, not just one of the great Canadian lyricists. This is the institution settling that argument in our favour.
You don't need a ticket to see it. The ceremony streams live on Amazon Music's Twitch channel and in the Amazon Music app, and it's on Prime Video in Canada. Massey Hall has tickets if you want to be in the room.
HIP NEWS
September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and it matters here for reasons that don't need spelling out. If you're looking for somewhere to put the day, the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund is the place to start, and their Secret Path Week runs October 17 to 22. Same night as GEDfest.
The Tragically Hip On Shuffle - Live Stream is back on Wednesdays. No more Tuesday or Thursday scrambles now that Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour has been put to bed.
At any rate, I need panelists for September and October. If you've ever thought about doing one and talked yourself out of it, this is me asking. Put your name in the hat and tell me a song you'd fight about.
And if you're not playing Dave from Edmonton's bracket yet, you're missing the best thing happening in the group daily. One hundred and twenty-eight Hip songs went in. We're into round four, which is where it stops being fun and starts being a moral crisis. Come vote, come argue, join the community group and play along.
WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO
Reflections is done, and I want to say something about it properly.
All summer, people sat down with me and told me about the best night of their lives, then kept going and told me the worst part of it too. The ticket panic. The drives. The kid on the shoulders. More than a few cried on a live stream in front of strangers, which is not a small thing to do.
Every one of you who came on and was honest: thank you. In forty years somebody will want to know what that summer felt like from the floor, and it's on the record because you put it there.
To everybody in Kingston, same. More at the bottom.
The other thing eating my fall is a four-part series on GEDfest, debuting in a few weeks. Past, Present, Future, and Secret Sauce. Four round tables answering the three questions I get asked most: what is this thing, where is it going, and what would it take to run one where you live.
That last one is why I made it. GEDfest started because one guy in Calgary asked some bands to play a room. It's been a tonne of fun to produce and host, and if it puts that idea in one person's head it's done its job.
EPISODE RECAPS
'Tiger The Lion' (The Tragically Hip On Shuffle). The wheel landed on the second track from "Music @ Work" and the table found more in it than anybody expected. 89 live performances ever, first on June 16, 2000 and last on a night in November 2009, per Hipbase and setlist.fm. Fifteen as an opener, which everybody understood, and fifteen as an encore, which nobody did. Never a single. It landed at 65 on the TTHTop40 Countdown and nobody has made peace with that one. Then Duxoop from Toledo asked what the opening noise actually is. Jeff from Belleville had gone digging, so the answer came out live, along with an instrument buried under it that most of the congregation has never once picked out. Best of all: Gord is reciting under Rob's outro. Not scatting, reciting, from a poem by a Canadian poet he loved enough to later record in full, and the hotel that poem is named for is a ten-minute walk from where Jeff grew up. Greg from Tacoma brings John Cage, and Dave from Halifax works out how a song with no chorus hooks anybody at all. Next week: 'No Threat'.
Ottawa, August 18, 2016 (Yer Hipstories: Reflections From The Final Tour). The second-last night, at the Canadian Tire Centre out past the car dealerships, told ten years to the day by two men who were there. Kingston was a pipe dream by then, so for most of the country Ottawa was it. Shawn from Ottawa has been on Hipbase since he was sixteen, and his ticket turned up in his inbox from a presale nobody has really talked about in public, with something in the will call envelope nobody warned him about. Justin from Bridport, who you know from Discovering Downie, only got there because a stranger with long hair heard "Yer Favourites" over the PA at a dirt track in Vermont. He said yes first and introduced himself second. They walk the set list, and it isn't the greatest hits argument you'd expect. 'Opiated' out of nowhere. Four from "In Between Evolution", four from "Day For Night", and the moment mid-set when Shawn worked out none of them would make Kingston. They both land on 'Summer's Killing Us', and Ottawa turned out to be the last place The Hip ever played it. Then there's the morning of the announcement: Justin alone in a car in Vermont listening to a DJ who couldn't finish a sentence, Shawn in a country where everybody already knew before he was properly awake. Ten years on, that gap is what gets them both. Set list data from setlist.fm, with thanks to Darren at The Tragically Hip Archive and to the tapers.
GEDFEST IS SOLD OUT
As of Sunday, August 23, there is not a ticket left for GEDfest Toronto.
The Horseshoe Tavern, October 17, and the room is full. I have never once had to write that sentence about something I was involved in, so give me a second here.
Thank you. Every one of you who bought in August, when October felt like a lifetime away, you did that. Every dollar goes to Campfire Circle and the Murphy Family Fund in Precision Medicine in Pancreatic Cancer, which is the entire point.
Two more things. 40 Hours Over have been added, opening for Grace 2. Two bands, one night. And there will be prizes galore.
And if you missed out: hang on. I've got a pair, and they're going to somebody in this community. More to come.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
On August 20th, 2016, I was on my couch.
That's it. I was on my couch.
That's the entire memory I had of the biggest night in the history of The Tragically Hip. A couch, me on it, propped up like a doll somebody had finished playing with.
Let's start at the start.
2016 took about a third of the year from me, between North York General Hospital, then Sunnybrook. And I want to be careful with how I say this next part, because by and large, I am told I got exceptional care. And I believe that.
But not all of it was. That's the honest version. And I'm still doing the math on which was which.
One of the things they tried was electroconvulsive therapy. Bilateral, which means both sides of my head instead of just one. They put you under, they give you something so your body stays still, and then a current triggers a short seizure in your brain.
It works for some people. It worked on me, in the ways they measure working.
In this case, though, it also took my memories, and it wrecked my ability to make new ones.
They tell you that can happen. They do tell you. But you never expect. Nobody can hand you what that's going to feel like from the inside. And I wasn't in any shape to really hear that anyway.
So. August 20th, 2016. Kingston. The farewell. The last time those five men would ever be in a room together doing what they were so good at.
I'm propped up on my couch the same way I was on my seat for the second Toronto show, sitting there like a goddamn zombie, trying to feel it.
And I mean, that's the part that guts me now, ten years later. I wasn't feeling it. I was trying to feel it. I was working on feeling it, like a guy leaning on a door that only opens the other way, though.
Anyway, by the next morning, it was gone. All of it. Every bit.
Here's the thing, though. I've only recently realized that since 2018, since I started making these podcasts, what I've actually been doing is documenting my way back to this band.
Building it back. One podcast, one conversation, one song at a time.
Listen, this was never the plan. I'm not that organized. It's just what happened. And you have been along for the whole thing, which, yeah, thanks for that.
Flash forward.
August 20th, 2026. Ten years to the day. The show ends, and I'm standing there incredulous. Speechless. Wrecked.
And I'm surrounded by throngs of people who feel exactly the same way. All of us confused and a little bit lost. Because it's over.
Again. It's fucking over again.
But then I had a thought. Except this wasn't a new thought. It was a thought from ten years ago. My brain didn't just find a key. It unlocked the door, and held it open, and invited me in.
Here's what was inside.
The same disbelief, the same refusal. I would not accept that any of this was the end of it. There had to be one more tour, one more show, one more song.
But then the curtain dropped, and my head dropped with it. And as I looked down at my always shaking legs, I wept.
That's the memory. That's what I was allowed to keep.
One night, one room, one couch, and a grown man crying into his own knees.
But I'll take it. I'll take it. Because I will hold that memory for as long as my brain lets me. Forever and a day.
Big thanks to everybody who was in that group outdoors in Springer Market Square, and to everybody who carried it out into the night with us afterwards. I had a lot of fun. You know exactly who you are.
They say don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Sure. Fine.
But that's not what happened to me. The tears were necessary. They were the lubricant. Those tears are what forced the door open. I had to cry before I could remember, and I had to remember before I could feel anything real about that night again.
So no. Cry because it's fucking over. Cry hard.
And then go and see what it shakes loose.
So there's that.
ANNIVERSARIES AND NODS
Two records this month, and they bookend the climb.
"Up To Here" arrived September 5, 1989, so it turns 37. Gold that January, platinum by March, diamond in Canada since. The one that turned a bar band into a national concern.
"Day For Night" followed on September 20, 1994, and turns 32. It moved 300,000 copies in Canada inside four days, became the first Hip record to debut at number one at home, and stands seven times platinum.
Five Septembers apart. One announced them, the other proved it wasn't a fluke.
THAT'S ALL FOLKS
That's the month. A hall of fame, a sold out room, a bracket about to cost somebody a friendship, and a story I wasn't sure I'd ever tell.
Thank you for the summer, and for being the kind of room a person can say all that out loud in.
Two asks before you go:
• Come play the bracket and argue with us in the community Facebook group. • And if this letter and these shows are worth something to you, drop a caribou in the hat. No pressure, ever. It just keeps the machine oiled.
One more time: panelists wanted for September and October On Shuffle. Come talk about a song with us.
Until next month, yer pal. -jD.
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