The Tragically Hip’s most popular album turned 30-years-old this past October, and longtime fans are not surprised by the impact it still has on Canadians
By: Nika Petrosian
The Tragically Hip performing in Orpheum in Vancouver on June 22, 2009, during their tour supporting the album We are the Same (Image courtesy of Scott Alexander via Wikimedia Commons)
From the second you hit play, Fully Completely explodes. Not just a spark — a full-on fireworks display.
The Tragically Hip’s third studio album was released on Oct. 6, 1992, becoming the band’s most well-known album in their decades-long discography. The album, which turned 30-years-old this October, has become an enduring, unwavering pillar of Canadian music and pop culture.
There is a relentless momentum that drives through the entirety of Fully Completely. The album takes off with Courage (For Hugh Maclennan) like a train barrelling down its tracks. The song pays homage to Canadian author Hugh Maclennan and his novel The Watch That Ends the Night, which places the stories, landscapes and scenery of Canada at its core. This is a theme embraced by the band throughout their entire discography. It is an ode to Maclennan, but also to courage and to human perseverance. It is driving — optimistic and hopeful in nature. It is anthemic — a rhapsody; a call to the undercurrents of courage that anchor us in the face of uncertainty.
The forceful drive grinds through the biting Looking for a Place to Happen and the gripping At the Hundredth Meridian while it depicts the pillaging and destruction brought upon Indigenous Peoples by early European colonizers. It creeps ominously through Locked in the Trunk of a Car, where the late lead singer Gord Downie crams emotion into every single word.
It makes sense that Fully Completely is packed with such intensity. By the time the band had begun recording at Battery Studio in London, England, with producer Chris Tsangarides — who had previously worked with acts like Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest — they were already building on the success of their second album, Road Apples, and their years of boisterous Kingston bar shows and tours across southern Ontario.
“The Hip were never, ever shy about the work,” Stephen Dame told CanCulture. Dame is a longtime fan and the creator and curator of A Museum After Dark, a deeply extensive and detailed online museum dedicated to the “people, places, and poetry found in the music of The Tragically Hip.” He says the grit — the collective grueling effort that went into the years of touring, performing, songwriting, composing and recording — is an aspect that deeply resonates with Canadians.
The unwavering endurance is a trait that is seen in many figures in Canadian pop culture and history, and Fully Completely encapsulates it completely. “It was apparent upon first-listen that this was something special, a work of great effort, art and care,” said Dame.
Toronto Star music journalist Nick Krewen told CanCulture that the album showcases a sense of maturity that the band’s prior two albums hadn’t yet established.
“There was a lot more finesse with this album that really coincided with the fact that the band was really finding their feet stylistically,” explained Krewen.
The band’s third studio album was created with the intention of breaking through to international audiences. While it never took off overseas, Fully Completely was a massive success in Canadian audiences, selling over one million copies and eventually earning diamond certification.
The hard work not only paid off sonically, but these songs also brought Canadian stories to the forefront that may not have even been told otherwise.
“The lyrics were deep and unique, and they often dropped references to people or places which you knew about, thought you knew or maybe figured you should know about,” said Dame.
And it’s true. Fully Completely unearths stories that may have otherwise been buried deep beneath centuries of history. 1951 Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Bill Barilko’s legacy was brought to light in the song Fifty Mission Cap when the band spoke to his Stanley Cup-winning goal, followed by a plane crash and his disappearance.
In Wheat Kings, Downie tells the story of 17-year-old David Milgaard, who was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome murder of nursing assistant Gail Miller, while a gentle acoustic guitar guides the song along. The song, which was released six months after Milgaard’s release, is one of the band’s most well-known tracks, and is, according to Downie in the book Top 100 Canadian Singles, a depiction of unwavering faith — it’s, “about our big country and its faith in man's fallibility”, said Downie.
It’s not that they spawned a million more Tragically Hips, it’s that they spawned a million more acts that act like The Tragically Hip
“People were hungry to hear those kinds of stories in rock songs,” said Michael Barclay, the author of The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip.
Barclay explained that while the setting is key in genres like country, rap or folk, Canadian rock music found its pillars in other aspects instead. “Hip hop is all about ‘sense of place.’ You know where every rapper is from because they tell you all the time. Canadian rock singers did not do that before The Tragically Hip.”
The songs in Fully Completely spoke to listeners across the country who had been desperately longing for stories that were inherently theirs.
The familiarity of Canadian landscapes and current events evoked a sense of pride that had been previously lacking. The music spoke to listeners who, according to Dame, “took notice of songs about Prime Ministers instead of Presidents, the St. Lawrence instead of the Mississippi and hockey players instead of the Boys of Summer.”
“If you were coming of age and figuring out your own identity, at a time when referendums and constitutional crises caused the whole country to think about its identity, then this music was uniquely yours,” said Dame. It was a rare moment in pop culture where Canadians could actually understand and relate.
Now, decades later, both Fully Completely and the legacy of The Tragically Hip have endured the passage of time. Their values, their sound, the localness of their stories, and their refusal to stray from these ideas have all trickled into modern Canadian culture.
“The people inspired by The Tragically Hip were mostly inspired to do their own thing. Not trying to be just like their heroes musically or lyrically, but take that independence and self-confidence into what they do,” said Barclay. “I think that is the lasting legacy. It’s not that they spawned a million more Tragically Hips, it’s that they spawned a million more acts that act like The Tragically Hip,” he said.
When asked about the lasting impact of Fully Completely, Dame shared a memory of when he used to drive back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto in the late 90s and into the 2000s.
“Regardless of which direction I was heading, if I had the rock station on the radio, before the signal faded out I would very, very often hear something from Fully Completely,” he said.
Years later, Dame will still hear a familiar song from Fully Completely today.
“That is a rare honour for any album, and I bet it will still be a laurel the band can claim a decade or two from now.”