The Hip’s Gord Downie Releases Solo Album

The new solo album from Gord Downie, lead singer for the Tragically Hip, goes into wide release this Tuesday.

Its titled “The Grand Bounce”,  is a term for desertion that comes from Evan S. Connell’s biography of General Custer used because, as Downie explained in a recent interview “we (Canadians) live in a deserter’s paradise here”.

The lyrics for its opening track,  The East Wind, were developed from a notebook of phrases he keeps. Once he had the melody in his head, he discovered on a phrase used by a neighbour that he’d written down, about how the east wind “doesn’t go around you; it goes through you.”

This line yielded the song’s chorus, and other quotes on that same notebook page – from Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Western novel The Ox-Bow Incident and from Al Purdy’s poem Necropsy of Love – were also used, initially as placeholders but then kept for the final song.

“It’s like quick-drying cement,” Downie said in that same interview. “You’re really loath to change it after the fact.”

The Grand Bounce is available on vinyl now, and in wide release on Tuesday.

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Gord Downie Tour Dates (unofficial):

06/19/10 Belleville, ON
07/01/10 Mississauga, ON
07/03/10 Niagara Falls, NY
07/09/10 Ottawa, ON
07/10/10 Sudbury, ON
07/11/10 Winnipeg, MB
07/15/10 Bala, ON
07/17/10 Windsor, ON
07/18/10 London, ON
07/24/10 Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON
07/25/10 Guelph, ON
08/05/10 Edmonton, AB
08/07/10 Hamilton, ON
08/15/10 Salmon Arm, BC

The Tragically Hip – often referred to as “The Hip” – is a Canadian rock band from Kingston, Ontario that formed in 1983.

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Photo: Matt MacGillivray

Tags: Gord Downie, The Tragically Hip

Category: Entertainment