Gord Downie

Gordon Edgar Downie is a Canadian singer-songwriter and activist, best known as the frontman for the rock band The Tragically Hip from 1984 until his passing in 2017. Born in Amherstview, Ontario, on February 6, 1964, he played in several bands in high school and later majored in film studies at Queen's University. In 1984, he and other high school friends formed the Tragically Hip, a group that became one of the most influential bands in Canadian music. Over a 33-year career, the group released 13 studio albums, nine of which hit Number 1 in Canada: Road Apples (1991), Fully Completely (1992), Day for Night (1994), Trouble at the Henhouse (1996), Phantom Power (1998), Music @ Work (2000), In Between Evolution (2004), We Are the Same (2009), and Man Machine Poem (2016). As for his solo endeavors, Gord Downie made his solo debut in 2001 with Coke Machine Glow, followed by Battle of the Nudes (2003), The Grand Bounce (2010) with the Country of Miracles, and And the Conquering Sun (2014) with the Sadies. Released in 2016, his fifth full-length Secret Path was accompanied by both a graphic novel and an animated TV film that won two Canadian Screen Awards in 2018. His final solo album, Introduce Yerself, was released ten days after his untimely passing on October 17, 2017, from a brain tumor diagnosed back in 2015. Introduce Yerself was his first solo album to reach Number 1 in Canada, and was followed by the posthumous releases Away Is Mine (2020) and Lustre Parfait (2023), the first preview of a collection of previously unreleased songs recorded in collaboration with Bob Rock.