one year, one canadian

I first discovered the Cowboy Junkies when my brother brought home their extraordinary 1988 album, The Trinity Sessions. The band’s languid rhythms and Margo Timmons’s hesitant, sultry whisper clutched at my serious teenage heart, and kicked off a lifetime love affair. They were the first band I ever really discovered, and they were Canadian.

And, while the band has taken musical vacations to different climes–the American South or China–they’ve always felt profoundly Canadian. The sparseness of their sound seems to echo our endless wilderness. They’ve always been a humble band–songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmons (Margo’s brother) plays sitting down, with his hair concealing his face. And their back catalog is full of Neil Young covers.

I had been primed to love the Junkies, of course, because my childhood household was filled with rock and roll–and lots of it Canadian. I didn’t appreciate them then as much as I do now, but my father fed us a steady stream of Neil Young and The Band. One of the first riffs I mastered when I was learning to play the guitar was the emblematic opening of Young’s “Hey Hey, My My”.

The Junkies were just the first in a long line of Canadian bands I’ve come to deeply admire. They’re in a zigzaggy line from the Junkies through Weeping Tile to, most recently, Dan Mangan.

My taste is mostly in the folk rock and singer-songwriter mold, but I dabble in other mediums. My favourite music to listen to while I write are Glenn Gould’s famous recordings of Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations”. And I fell for Sophie Milman when I saw her play at the Vancouver Jazz Festival a few years ago.

The Rules

They’re pretty simple. I’ll only listen to Canadian music for the rest of the year. There’s not a lot I can do when I leave the house, but at home, on my iPhone and in the car I’m going all-Canadian, all the time.

Will that be a burden? As it happens, I’m an obsessive self-documenter, and so for years have tracked my musical taste with Last.fm. Here’s what I’ve listened to over the last 12 months:

I’ll accept partial responsibility for Taylor Swift, but not Glee. In any case, more than half of my most-listened-to artists are already Canadian. My wife and I have an iTunes library of about 10,000 songs. I went through them and made a playlist of all the Canadian ones, and that came out to be about 1,500 tunes. So, that should carry me through the rest of the year.

Photo by Adam Bowie.