There is a line in “Bobcaygeon” — I left your house this morning / about a quarter after nine — that sounds like nothing, and then it sounds like everything, and then you realize Gord Downie just described an entire doomed relationship in the time it takes to pour a second cup of coffee.
Phantom Power came out in the summer of 1998, the Hip’s seventh studio album, and it arrived at the moment when a lot of people had started to suspect that Canadian rock radio was about to eat itself alive. Nu-metal was sharpening its teeth. The Hip did not care. They drove deeper into whatever strange country they had been mapping since Up to Here, and they came back with something that felt, paradoxically, both more expansive and more intimate than anything they had done before.
The Room It Was Made In
The band tracked Phantom Power at Reaction Studios in Toronto with producer/engineer Mark Howard and mixing engineer Trina Shoemaker — Shoemaker fresh off her work with Sheryl Crow and about to win a Grammy for her engineering on Emmylou Harris’s Spyboy. Howard had spent the previous few years working closely with Daniel Lanois, and you can hear that in the record’s air. There is reverb here that doesn’t feel applied; it feels like the room is breathing.
Rob Baker and Paul Langlois are playing some of the most economical guitar work of their careers. Nothing is wasted, and when Baker opens up — the solo in “Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin’ Man,” the churning mid-section of “The Bastard” — it lands harder for everything that was held back.
Johnny Fay sits in the pocket throughout, and Gord Sinclair’s bass is the record’s spine, holding the arrangement together while Downie goes wherever the song needs him to go. The Hip always worked as a genuine five-piece democracy, but on Phantom Power the rhythm section deserves its own paragraph. They earned it.
What Downie Did Here
Gord Downie is probably the finest lyricist English Canada produced in the twentieth century, and I am prepared to argue that point after midnight with anyone who shows up.
By 1998 he had developed this technique — call it oblique portraiture — where the song circles its subject without ever landing directly on it. “Poets” conjures the whole weight of a particular Canadian melancholy without naming it. “Fireworks” is ostensibly a Fourth of July meditation but it’s really about belonging and not belonging in the same breath. “Thompson Girl” takes a town in northern Manitoba and turns it into something mythological.
The album is sequenced like a long drive home through the Shield country. You come in off the highway a little road-weary, and by the time “Escape Is at Hand for the Travellin’ Man” closes things out, you feel like you’ve covered distance.
Why It Holds
Records that sound like their moment often don’t survive the next decade. Phantom Power sounds like 1998 in some ways — the production sheen is particular to that period — but the songs are built from something older and more durable.
“Bobcaygeon” has outlasted nearly every song it shared the charts with, not because it’s simple but because it earns its plainness. Downie knew when to strip back to the essentials. The band knew when to follow.
There are nights when you put this on at eleven o’clock and you just let it run. No shuffling. No skipping. The whole thing as a continuous argument for why rock and roll made with actual specificity — real places, real grief, real wonder — can survive anything the industry throws at it.
Gord Downie died in October 2017, two years after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. He spent those final years finishing work, saying goodbye publicly in the way that only he could have done it.
The record is still there. Still driving north.