Dan Krahn

"To see a world in a grain of sand..."

YouTube video by TheTragicallyHipVEVO The Tragically Hip - New Orleans Is Sinking (Live At Misty Moon)

youtu.be/yzHs6AckfXg?...

Well, "feeling" is very loose--maybe thematic zone. The song still has meaning, but that meaning seems more like a defined area, a thematic zone in which the lyrics can wander around, rather than a point or line.

It's early, but I'm forming an idea of how The Hip/Downie approached songwriting. It seems less about coherent storytelling (though some songs are more straight-forward than others), more about establishing a feeling.

Some sort of spoken word performance or storytelling, for instance; some rant about whatever he was thinking about. They also often inserted other songs, either covers or material they were testing, turning the whole thing into a medley, or some meandering prog exercise.

I mostly take in music as a recorded medium, though, and not as a live experience. In concert, "New Orleans is Sinking" became something else entirely. It often featured long improvisational sections, during which Downie would go off and do… whatever the hell he felt like doing, it seems.

Just look at how Nick Cave has altered and transformed "The Mercy Seat" over the years. The song changes; the artist changes.

I suppose I tend to think of songs as stable, their form and meaning fixed, even though I know they are often not like this at all. Songs change their form and meaning all the time, especially over the course of a long career.

YouTube video by TheTragicallyHipVEVO The Tragically Hip - New Orleans Is Sinking

Year of The Tragically Hip: Up to Here (1989):

I haven't used the story in class for a few years now but I'm bringing it back this term. We'll see how it goes.

That's why I never really did Twitter. But it's not like that many people are still hanging around Facebook.

The character limit is still nearly a deal-breaker.

I've known this song for a long time, or at least known about it, and I wouldn't have guessed it was from their first album. This feels like third or fourth album material. There is something very mature about this, and I find it a bit funny that I was just complaining about "I'm a Werewolf, Baby."

In Goodfellas there's this part where Ray Liotta is out of his mind on drugs, everything is moving really fast for him, all quick edits and cameras spinning, and it all looks like a nightmare, and you can feel your own heart speeding up in alarmed sympathy. I get a similar feeling from this song.

Downie's singing is also oddly chaotic and hard to follow. Everything is clear enough, in the sense that you can hear everything he's singing, but somehow in the performance it all gets muddled and difficult to follow, at least it does for me.

There is a singer-narrator, and he seems like he is desperately trying to hold things together. He can get behind anything and he's pretty sure it's genuine. But what exactly any of this means is unclear.

Elvis is the touchstone image here, the quintessential rock 'n' roller who went too fast. Considering this is technically The Hip's first album after a very successful EP, the rock 'n' roll warning bell here might be relevant, but seems a bit too cute to me.

Some very specific images appear, not quite contextless but not entirely coherent: an Elvis movie filmed at the speedway, a taxi driver in the throes of passion, a fast woman getting married. The images swirl chaotically and there is a feverish feel, like it is all going too fast, try to keep up.

The phrase "don't blow at high dough" is a phrase Gord's mother used. I'm not familiar with this piece of gnomic wisdom, but it apparently refers to blowing on dough to stop it rising, which doesn't work—in other words, don't get ahead of yourself, or something like that. Don't go too fast.

YouTube video by TheTragicallyHipVEVO The Tragically Hip - Blow At High Dough (Official Music Video)

Year of The Tragically Hip: Up to Here (1989):