Phantom Power

When you walk on...

We premiered Phantom Power when that came out with four or five shows.

It was four or five shows that were just sort of...

We announced them at 7 o'clock in the morning and then played a show that night.

This next track was locked away in the vault for 25 long years before finally seeing the light of day.

We're spinning an official unreleased outtake from the 1998 Phantom Power Sessions, the gorgeous atmospheric sleeper hit titled Mystery.

Back in late 1997 and early 1998, when the band went into the studio with producer Steve Berlin, they were operating at a peak level of creative chemistry.

While songs like Poets, Bob Cajun, and Save the Planet made the final cut, a small cluster of brilliant tracks were left behind in the tape vaults.

Mystery is quintessential late 90s hip.

Driven by a slow-burning, hypnotic rhythm and those lush, layered guitars from Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, it gives Gore Downey the perfect canvas for a reflective, late-night vocal delivery that is pure poetry.

From the 25th anniversary edition of Phantom Power, here is Mystery.

Somewhere there's a soccer game I can hear the wild crowd moan It's not that life here is distasteful to me It's just that I'm all alone On what takes a lifetime to learn Turn around and start again And after that to turn inside With no more pause than I had then It's not that it's such a mystery I saw it from miles away It's not that it's such a mystery That I ran out of things to say In time I'll only think of you When I'm buttering my toast Or some other reflective moment Or I expect the least, remember the most It's not that it's such a mystery It was practically on display It's not that it's such a mystery We've got world enough and time And whether youth comes or goes Hope you always think of me as mine guitar solo It's not that it's such a mystery This newfound malaise It's just that this mystery Has taken your place so so

Eagle-eyed fans will instantly recognize the blueprint here.

Gore Downie took the framework, lyrics, and ideas from UC Details and eventually transformed them into Bumblebee, the legendary Phantom Power outtake.

It gives you a front row seat to Gord's creative process as a lyricist, watching how a raw idea evolved over the years before finding its home.

From the Ultimate Rarities bootleg, here is UC Details.

That locked in rhythm section and the razor sharp guitar interplay between Rob Baker and Paul Lingua is essential hip.

but seeing how Gord held onto those lyrical ideas and kept refining them across different eras shows you just how deliberately he worked as a writer.

Even though it took years for those ideas to officially reach our ears on the Phantom Power expanded release, the fact that tracks like this survived through fan trade networks and bootlegs like Ultimate Rarities is a testament to the sheer depth of their vaults.

And that is your little nugget for today.

98, yeah.

Phantom Power, which I bought earlier this year, which is just a brilliant, brilliant album.

There's two other albums I listen to more than this, but this was to hand.

uh so i'll put this on i absolutely love this album it's super this is where it's still very much in a sort of alt rock sort of bit pearl jammy bit re me okay you know a bit of a bit of a swag there's even a bit of stones to them i'd say but you know the good bits but it's got a real swagger to this album um Arguably, it's one of their last sort of great albums because they had a run in the early 2000s of albums which weren't great, which weren't very good.

Showed recent guest on the show, Craig Silifant, and his fantastic book, Bunny Hug Cynic.

Anyway, and that was in Phantom Power Side A episode, I think.

Anyway, these garments feature the classical Tragically Hip logo aside the logo, alongside the logo of the nine teams in the CFL.

So, you know, you got a Tragically Hip BC Lions hoodie, and a Calgary Stampeders Tragically Hip T-shirt, and Toronto Argonauts, and so on and so forth.

It didn't hook me the way that everything up to this point had.

Phantom Power, you know, Day for Night.

Day for Night is probably my favorite album, you know, hip album of all time.

Um, but, uh, this one, I remember it left me kind of wanting to be honest, the first time I heard it.

How about that? How about you, Justin? You have a more recent history, I suppose, for lack of a better term, with music at work.

This is sort of your jumping in point, right?

Yeah, Phantom Power was, and then this was the first album that I had

when I had