Northern exposure

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2022 (1400 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Those who have come of age with Drake and The Weeknd being among the biggest names in music, period, might take it for granted that Canadian artists can rise to such heights. But that wasn’t always the case.

In Hearts on Fire, Michael Barclay delivers an authoritative (exhaustive, even) analysis of how independent artists from across Canada took the world by storm in the early days of the 21st century, changing the cultural and musical landscape for those who came up after.

“This new movement — which wasn’t a short-lived trend but continues today — wasn’t just so-called indie rock, chart pop or any music traditionally associated with Canada’s cultural output,” Barclay asserts early on. “It was everything.”

A historian and co-author of Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-95 and author of The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, Barclay certainly knows his subject matter inside and out. Boasting over 100 original interviews, along with archival material galore, the stories of indie rock collectives such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene and popular acts such as Tegan and Sara, The Metric and Feist are covered.

Ditto the folk and country twang of Corb Lund, the Be Good Tanyas, Sarah Harmer and Kathleen Edwards as well as the weird and wild sounds of Peaches, Caribou and the Unicorns. Not to be left out, hip hop chart toppers k-os and Swollen Members to rockers Alexisonfire and Billy Talent and many, many more disparate acts all get their time in the spotlight (along with a fair amount who only warrant passing mention, for one reason or another).

“(But) one band cast the longest shadow of all,” Barclay admits. “And not only because its singer stands six foot five.”

That band, of course, is Arcade Fire, the group who formed in Montreal and went on to sell millions of records, headline concerts and festivals around the world and become the first Canadian band to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year (for 2010’s The Suburbs).

“Ten years earlier, it would have been a momentous occasion for the country, like Olympic hockey gold or an NBA championship,” Barclay argues. “Yet this was merely yet another WTF moment in a game-changing decade of Canadian music.”

While the length of the tome might be off-putting to casual readers, Barclay does an admirable job of establishing the connections between seemingly disparate artists, be they overlapping personnel, recurring players in the Canadian media landscape or the shared challenges (or opportunities) inherent to creating and marketing independent music during the twilight of the CD boom and the dawn of the file-sharing era.

Granted, plenty of the focus remains on artists from the greater Toronto area or nearby Montreal. But Barclay also goes to lengths to shine light on artists from Halifax to Campbell River, B.C., with plenty of stops in between. The impact and influence of hometown heroes the Weakerthans is discussed at length, as are plenty of artists who’ve graced our local stages and festivals time and time again.

“Residents of every province and every metropolis will feel underrepresented,” Barclay acknowledges. “That’s the story of Canadian history… That’s the story of this book as well.”

As the story of Canadian music continues to be written, Hearts on Fire is sure to be a cornerstone for those looking to either learn more or further document the scene, to make sense of that time when a bunch of scrappy Canadians found themselves in the spotlight on the world stage and never looked back.

Sheldon Birnie is a reporter and the author of Missing Like Teeth: An oral history of Winnipeg underground rock 1990-2001 (which is referenced once in Hearts on Fire).