"He didn't want to do something like a Hip record, so it was totally a left turn.
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" Coke Machine Glow was such a left turn from what people knew as through the Tragically Hip, but that was intentional," Finlayson explains. Reflecting on that time period, Finlayson speaks warmly of his late friend in sharing how he has always thought of Downie as "a natural collaborator" who encouraged fellow players to be themselves when it came time to create and share ideas. "That was a little more than 10 years into his career with the Hip, and he had been living in Toronto, and I think he wanted to expand his roots…meeting people and working with people and recording here," Finlayson recalls of the sessions, pointing to contributions from Julie Doiron, the Sadies' Travis Good, By Divine Right's José Contreras, Barenaked Ladies' Kevin Hearn and his Skydiggers bandmate Andy Maize, among others. It arrives nearly 20 years after the pair first came together for Downie's 2001 solo debut, Coke Machine Glow, an album that Finlayson feels not only helped the late songwriter plant deeper roots in Toronto, but also opened new avenues of artistic expression outside their respective groups.
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We were both big hockey fans."įinlayson and his six strings have remained a near constant in Downie's solo output, culminating with this year's Away Is Mine, a posthumous record that marks the final 10 songs the Hip frontman recorded before his 2017 passing following a battle with terminal brain cancer. Not that they knew each other, but there were a lot of those connections: family, music, humour. I grew up in Toronto, but both his folks were from here, and my mom grew up not far away from the area his mom grew up in. "He grew up in Amherstview, so I think he always felt like sort of a small town guy. "He would often refer to me as 'his oldest Toronto friend,' so I carry that with me," Finlayson tells Exclaim!, recalling how they grew even closer upon Downie making a move to the provincial capital.
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The performances would lay the foundation for a personal and professional relationship of nearly three decades, throughout which Finlayson became one of Downie's closest collaborators outside of his beloved band. Years later, he would meet the frontman as a co-founder of Skydiggers, supporting the Hip at shows in Ottawa and Montreal behind their 1989 debut, Up to Here.
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Josh Finlayson's earliest exposure to Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip came via his Kingston-based friends buzzing about the young outfit, and through catching them himself at Toronto's Hotel Isabella in the late 1980s.