My book The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip came out five years ago this month. There are many things I could say about that, and its incredible success. Here are three of the best ones.
It gave me a reason to tour the country from coast to coast (and Buffalo and Atlanta), 48 dates in all. I met a lot of amazing people and reconnected with old friends. I wrote a book about a very Canadian subject and got to see most of Canada because of it.
Because it was a book about a lot more than music, it helped me overcome impostor syndrome about being “just a music writer.” It was likely one of the main reasons a lowly copy editor got the William Southam Journalism Fellowship at Massey College for 2021-22, a life-changing event that came at exactly the right moment in a multi-level mid-life crisis and introduced me to even more fascinating people, some of whom I know will be lifelong friends.
The book was a year-end bestseller and so it paid my rent and kept the lights on while I wrote Hearts on Fire, which came out a year ago this month. Hearts on Fire is a book I’d wanted to write for the past 10 years, a book about all kinds of people across the country, a book about when the weirdos won, a book about some stories I got to witness very closely. It’s a big book and it was a lot of work. I worked on it full-time for 18 months, something I would never have been able to afford to do if The Never-Ending Present wasn’t the success it was.
(FYI if you’re looking for this week’s live listings, they’re in last week’s post here.)
If you’re somewhat new to the Hip book or my work in general, I made some playlists a few years back to soundtrack it, available on Tidal, Apple and Spotify:
I annotated a playlist of obvious Hip hits here. It’s better than Yer Favourites ;)
I annotated some deep(ish) cuts from the Tragically Hip here.
I annotated the Influences playlist here.
I annotated the Gord Downie solo playlist here. It doesn’t include anything past the first posthumous release, Introduce Yerself. The Downie collaboration with Bob Rock is finally out in full on May 4.
I annotated the Peers and Producers playlist here.
Diamonds, diamonds
Some recent news: The Tragically Hip now have four diamond albums, after the certification of greatest-hits comp Yer Favourites last month. (The band’s first three albums have also gone diamond.) It’s just been released on vinyl, FYI: all killer, no filler, plus John Kendle’s liner notes.
That makes them the only Canadian band to have that many diamond records — although solo artist Céline Dion has six diamond records, and Shania Twain has three double diamond records.
I’m shocked that Nickelback is not on the diamond list at all — which likely has more to do with their success in the digital era rather than physical sales: digital downloads didn’t count until 2008; streaming didn’t factor in until 2016.
Likewise: Drake does not have any dancing diamond albums, which makes one wonder if the certification is remotely relevant to modern success. Although Ed Sheeran got two diamond albums in Canada, just last year.
Drake does have two diamond singles, however; the Weeknd, meanwhile, has five.
Also: just like gold and platinum certifications, the definitions were downsized a while back: diamond now represents 800,000 albums, rather than a million. (Gold went from 50,000 to 40,000; platinum from 100,000 to 80,000.)
These days, a single has to be streamed 150 times to count as one unit of certification: so a diamond single has to be streamed 120 million times. For albums, you need 1,500 streams of any one track from the record to count as a unit. Which means you need, uh, 12 billion cumulative streams of tracks from your album to go diamond.
The Never-Ending Present AMA
Since the release of The Never-Ending Present in April 2018, I’ve been interviewed by many of the country’s best journalists, both on stage and off. But the deepest dives I got into were on the Hipbase forum, where the Tragically Hip’s geekiest fans grilled me with some insightful questions.
I’d been lurking on the site while researching the book; I wanted to read honest appraisals of my work and assess what fans thought about the book both before and after it was published. So in August 2018, four months after its release and after I’d done a round of Ontario touring, I popped up and told them to ask me anything.
Here is a slightly edited version of our exchanges. Apologies for the use of abbreviations for album and book titles.
Dire Wolf asked: "Just curious, was there a particular reason given for why they chose not to participate? Or did they just send you a message saying ‘nope,’ and that was it?"
Here's the entire text of my email from manager Bernie Breen in April 2017, when I told them I'd signed a book contract:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to That Night in Toronto to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.