In 2014, Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene approached Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie about recording an album. Downie said he didn’t think he had any songs. “But,” he said, “I have been writing about Charlie.”
“Charlie” is Chanie Wenjack, a boy who, in the 1960s, was separated from his family and placed in the Cecelia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario. His name was warped into the misnomer “Charlie” by his teachers. One day he escaped the school and tried to walk home. His family lived 400 miles away. He never made it. The album that Drew and Downie made, Secret Path, is, in Downie’s words, “an attempt to capture the feeling, somehow, of trying to get home.”
The first residential schools appeared in Canada in the late 1800s, and the system survived until the mid-1990s; children were removed from their families and placed in distant boarding schools administered by local churches and funded by the federal government. The schools were developed to “take the Indian out of the child”; teachers forbid the students from speaking or writing in their native language and educated them exclusively in white culture and Christianity. The students suffered physical and sexual abuse; many died from disease, which spread recklessly through the schools. Others committed suicide. The Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of children in residential schools in 1920, and many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. A recent commission estimated that up to 6,000 children may have died while living in residential schools, and earlier this year a state of emergency was declared in the indigenous community of Attawapiskat after 11 people attempted suicide on the same day; one of the cited reasons for the suicide attempts is the lingering, cross-generational trauma of residential schools.
Downie tells Chanie’s particular version of this story by developing its sense of place. The compositions on Secret Path feel more like haunted environments than songs; it sounds as if Downie, Drew, and the Stills’ Dave Hamelin—all of whom supply most of the instrumentation—are all wandering through these spaces with Chanie. (This quality might’ve been transferred to the recordings by Drew, whose albums with Broken Social Scene have such a strongly defined sense of place that listening to them feels like visiting individual cities.) The instruments, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, are recorded in such a way that they produce atmospheres out of minimal playing. Piano chords drone and occasionally sound as if they’d been reduced to their own echo, wrapping the songs in a kind of musical shadow.
This is the most severe and spartan context that Downie’s sang in since his solo debut, 2001’s Coke Machine Glow, and his words for the most part land in the scenery as haunted, disconnected fragments. Downie, as a lyricist, is traditionally remarkable for his density. Unlike fellow Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, he is not particularly interested in space, and unlike fellow Canadian lyricist Joni Mitchell, his songs aren’t delivered by or assembled around characters. His work is rarely about himself, and in fact seems to flow from a composite perspective, a sensibility that shifts so often that it resists characterization or stability. He takes literature, history, and geography, and compresses them into living, shapeshifting jigsaw puzzles. A lyric from “Christmastime in Toronto,” from his 2003 solo album Battle of the Nudes: “With your dark epiphanies/Your true lines of smoke/Your glistening rails and streetcars all aglow/Always the wind and the persistent snow/Gets into your eyes and your mouth and every fold of your coat.” At least half of that line is from Chekhov, and the other half is a mundane image of winter in Toronto ascending into a realm of magic realism.
On Secret Path, Downie’s words have a sudden respect for space; they never veer from Chanie’s story. In the first song, “The Stranger,” Downie resists projecting onto Chanie, and the lyric produces an ambiguity and anxiety that feels true to the theoretical feelings of a lost 12-year-old: “And what I’m feeling is anyone’s guess/What is in my head?/And what's in my chest?.” But Downie is also capable of reducing the narrative to a single heartbreaking detail, as in the title track, where Chanie seems to wrestle with the definition of the word “windbreaker” as he’s assaulted by wind and frozen rain (“Doesn’t do what they said it’d do/It’s just a jacket”).
Downie’s more direct lyricism may also respond to how Secret Path itself a story of space—of the distance between Chanie and his family, of the yawning space between his footsteps as he walks over a seemingly infinite stretch of train tracks. The image of the train tracks is provided by artist Jeff Lemire, who illustrated a graphic novel around the album; Lemire wordlessly depicts Chanie’s life before and after escaping the residential school in elliptical, repeating images and rhythms: one Chanie and two other students on a swing set, just before they escape the school; one of a raven, which may or may not be Chanie’s hallucination, drifting in and out of the minimal, monochrome landscape, sometimes carrying a pair of articulated eyes in its beak; and one of Chanie’s father, who is a hallucination, and who materializes out of the only soft petals of color in the book. There’s an uncanny loneliness in Lemire’s pictures and in Downie’s words. “I can see my father’s face/Warming his feet by the stove,” Downie sings in “I Will Not Be Struck.” “We used to have each other/Now we only have ourselves.” He’s describing a kind of distance, a kind of space that can’t be filled or healed.
In August of this year, the Tragically Hip played what is potentially their final show, which took place in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Downie had been diagnosed a few months earlier with glioblastoma multiforme, a terminal brain tumor characterized by necrotizing tissue forming around aggressive, undifferentiated cells, and which in x-rays appears as a shadow swimming through fluorescent regions of the brain. Downie’s memory was compromised; he remembered his lyrics through teleprompters that were arranged around the stage. In between songs, with 11.7 million Canadians watching the concert through the CBC broadcast and its attendant stream, he started to improvise; Downie identified Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the audience, and admonished him to start repairing Canada’s relationship with its indigenous population. “It’s going to take us 100 years to figure out what the hell went on up there,” Downie said. “But it isn’t cool and everybody knows that. It's really, really bad, but we're going to figure it out. You're going to figure it out." Secret Path, it seems, is Downie’s own way of figuring it out.
