Line I’ve used a lot, but not always footnoted. Late, legendary Canadian singer/songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen, who passed away in Notes: Acclaimed Canadian singer/songwriter Adam Cohen is the son of the I talked to him after afterwards, and that’s his line. And, really, a lot of those decisions were hard to make - there are the ones you have to make, but they are hard to make “under the haze of sorrow,” as Adam Cohen told me. A lot of tributes and things were pouring in, in terms of all the ways in which people wanted to honor Gord. Patrick Downie: Well, given the circumstances, and just even the time of the first year or so after Gord passed, there were a lot of decisions to be made. Mike Mettler: Away Is Mine is such a beautiful gift.ĭid you know that October 2020 would be the timeframe for this release a whileīack? Or was it more like a natural sense of, “This is when we need to get this (You’ll find out which GD lyric is my favorite as well.) No one says goodbye anymore / for fear that’ll be goodbye. I got on a conference call that connected me across the border to the north with Downie and Finlayson in Ontario to discuss the makings of Mine, how growing up in a big family may have influenced Gord’s inimitable onstage persona, and what their personal favorite Gord lyrics are. Who knows what we would have seen from him in the future?” (Who knows, indeed.) Added Gord’s youngest brother and the album’s executive producer, Patrick Downie, “What will maybe become part of Gord’s musical legacy is that he was very agile, as he would say, or very chameleon-like in that he could sing many different styles of songs. That was part of the collaboration process with Gord,” Finlayson (who played on and off with Gord in his solo-band collectives for about 15 years) told me of the Mine sessions. “He was looking to be inspired, and he was looking to inspire. Is my personal, clear-cut choice as being the No. These are but a few of the many, myriad reasons why Away Is Mine On a second disc (or second LP, if you choose to enjoy the album on wax - which you The more special by the decision to include the acoustic versions of each song Track, the oh-so-aptly titled “Untitled,” Mine is all manna, made all Mantra of “The Least Impossible” to the sweet sayonara serenade of the final From theĭespairing swagger of “Useless Nights” to the echo-drenched too-self-aware Josh Finlayson and in-sympatico producer/mixer/engineer Nyles Spencer. Sparse, supportive arrangements courtesy Gord’s chief collaborators, acoustic guitarist/bassist Indeed, the ten tracks that comprise Downie’s final solo release, Away Is Mine (Arts & Crafts), whisk the listener headlong into a most magical, mystical, minimalist journey through Gord’s innermost thoughts as captured in the studio near the literal end of his life, seeing as they were all cut across four days at his band The Tragically Hip’s Bathouse studio in Bath, Ontario, in July 2017, just three short months before his untimely passing from glioblastoma that October.Įach Mine song is purely and perfectly delineated via

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