The Tragically Hip went to London to make Fully Completely with Chris Tsangarides, a producer whose résumé already included Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, and Gary Moore. MCA had obvious reasons to wonder whether the Hip could travel beyond Canada. Instead, the band came home with an album full of Hugh MacLennan, Jacques Cartier, Bill Barilko, David Milgaard and the hundredth meridian.
So how did a record made with a wider audience in sight become the album that made the Tragically Hip sound more Canadian than ever?
Part of the answer is that Fully Completely finally gives the band enough studio space for all five members to register clearly.
On “Courage (for Hugh MacLennan),” Rob Baker and Paul Langlois rarely occupy the same space. One guitar drives the rhythm while the other slips melodic figures around it, leaving Gord Sinclair’s bass and Johnny Fay’s drums room underneath. Fay keeps the beat loose enough for Gord Downie to push and pull at the vocal without the song losing its shape.
“At the Hundredth Meridian” works differently. The guitar riff is clipped and repetitive, Sinclair and Fay lock hard onto it, and Downie keeps tightening his delivery until the song cracks open into that frantic spoken section near the end. The band stays disciplined while he sounds increasingly less interested in doing so.
That relationship between the band and Downie is one of the album’s defining sounds: four musicians keeping the structure intact while the singer pushes at its edges.
“Locked in the Trunk of a Car” gives Downie an especially nasty place to work. The guitars repeat a dark, needling figure while the rhythm section moves with almost mechanical patience. Downie can mutter, bark, and eventually sound half-feral because the other four refuse to chase him into the same chaos.
Then “Wheat Kings” strips nearly all of that away. Acoustic guitar opens the song, the tempo relaxes, and the arrangement stays spare enough for the David Milgaard story to remain the focus. There is no oversized payoff waiting at the end. The band understands that piling more sound onto the song would only weaken it.
“Fifty Mission Cap” pulls off another difficult trick. The Bill Barilko story could easily have become hockey nostalgia with a chorus attached. Instead, the guitars circle around a compact progression while Downie delivers the details almost conversationally, like somebody passing along a story he has told before but still finds strange. The band never tells you which lines matter most.
That may be the biggest change on Fully Completely. The production is cleaner than Up to Here or Road Apples, but the extra definition reveals how unusual the Hip already were. Downie moves from literature to hockey history, wrongful conviction, and colonial history without turning the songs into lectures. Those references appear through characters, overheard phrases, odd images, and bits of Canadian history that seem to surface because that is simply where his mind goes.
Underneath him, the band remains remarkably physical. Sinclair’s bass moves melodically without slipping away from Fay. Baker supplies many of the sharper guitar figures, while Langlois fills out the centre so songs that look simple on paper rarely sound empty.
Which brings the original question back around.
How did an album recorded in London with an established international producer become the Tragically Hip’s most unmistakably Canadian statement?
Because Tsangarides didn’t sand away the details that made the band difficult to package. He made them easier to hear. Fully Completely gives the guitars more separation, the rhythm section more definition, and Downie enough room to write about Barilko, Milgaard, MacLennan, and the hundredth meridian without explaining why any of it should matter.
The Hip stopped sounding like a Canadian band trying to make a rock record for everybody else. They made a record this specific, and let everybody else come to them.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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