Introduce Yerself

Final album by Gord Downie (Arts & Crafts)

It’s impossible to approach Gord Downie’s sixth and, unfortunately, final solo recording with any sort of emotional detachment — at least for the moment, when the cultural wound left by the Tragically Hip frontman’s untimely passing at 53 on Oct. 17 remains very much open and raw.

Let’s be honest, though: there will likely never be any way to engage with Introduce Yerself on anything less than a highly emotional level. This album is simply not built that way. It cannot be divorced from the tragic circumstances of its creation, nor is it really intended to be.

A 23-track compendium of unguarded “farewell” letters in the wake of Downie’s 2015 diagnosis with terminal brain cancer penned to specific figures (and possibly one Great Lake and one pet) who had an indelible impact on his life and art, Introduce Yerself is veritably, intentionally, embedded in those tragic circumstances.

“This is my solo record. Each song is about a person,” Downie declared plainly in a short video introduction to the album posted to the internet last month.

It is, in a sense, the actual sound of the tragic circumstances, the sound of those tragic circumstances being confronted, processed, accepted and defiantly, artfully and passionately channelled into poetry and music by the man at their epicentre as he lived them out.

I won’t make it sound any easier to get through than it is, then; Introduce Yerself is a hard, sad go. As a new parent, for instance, I have been consistently and wholly breaking down just three tunes in to “Bedtime” — a whispered recollection of rocking an infant to sleep (“I’d get you to your crib / Slowly lower you down / And pull my hands away / As if from a bomb”) delivered in plangent lullaby form — since the album arrived in my inbox last week.

But if it’s a hard, sad go, it’s also a truly beautiful piece of work, one that rivals in its debilitating emotional impact even the sensitive imagining of the last days of residential-school victim Chanie Wenjack that Downie accomplished with last year’s Secret Path project.

Not that Introduce Yerself, unfussily produced and sometimes co-written by Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene with instrumental input from Dave Hamelin of the Stills, dwells too long or too often on the obvious.

The word “goodbye” first explicitly intrudes at the 1:15 mark of opener “First Person” and is implied throughout, but these vignettes drawn so vividly from a slowly eroding memory are, first and foremost, songs of love, and it’s the depth and directness of the love expressed that cuts right through you.

Although he’s by turns as cryptic and wryly humourous as ever, Downie has never opened himself up this much on record before, actually naming names on tunes like “Nancy,” “Ricky Please” and “My First Girlfriend” but otherwise peopling the songs on Introduce Yerself with so much specific detail that the recipients of that love will recognize themselves in the music when they hear it.

Tragically Hip fans left flowers and tributes to Gord Downie in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario, on Oct. 18. One local man said the singer’s death feels like losing a “pillar of the community.” (The Canadian Press)

In the appropriately Spoon-like “Spoon,” he’s taking a far-too-young child to see Spoon “just to say the first show for us two was Spoon” because they’d been riding around to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga together on vacation; in “A Natural,” watching a childhood friend pick tin cans off a picnic table with a BB gun while still wet from a swim; receiving letters from a long-distance lover scented with “Coco Chanel No. 5”; in “Snowflake,” walking as a child along the barren Lake Ontario shores in the whiteout dead of winter to a chilly house with a mysterious locked upstairs room. “Love Over Money,” for its part, is unmistakably a shoutout to his bandmates in the Tragically Hip, with whom he once “deafened the husband of the Queen of England,” and it is both affectionate and hilarious.

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Casual listening does not do Introduce Yerself justice, then. The words are there to be heard and Downie has packed this double-LP — recorded over two wintry sessions at the Hip’s Bathhouse Studio near Kingston in January 2016 and February of this year — as densely with poetry as any of his past records alone or with the Tragically Hip.

The music, likewise, sinks into you in much the same way the outwardly vaporous and vague songs on Secret Path did. You don’t realize you’ve been listening to 23 cleverly disguised pop songs until you find yourself walking around with the weary “Safe Is Dead” — or the tangled-but-punchy title track or the brooding Bowie-in-Berlin buzzer “A Better Ending” or the final, amorphous call-out to the Indigenous peoples “way up in the north” whose cause gave Downie renewed purpose, or the “let me walk to the edge with a smile” during his last days that is “The North” -rattling around in your head.

These songs haunt you.

“It was like making something that could only be made once,” Kevin Drew said to me of making Introduce Yerself last week. “Never felt that before. I loved and will continue to love him.”

We shall miss you, Mr. Downie.