Songs About Vancouver
Over at Metroblogging Vancouver, Jeffery has assembled a top-five list of songs about Vancouver. My favourite on the list is “Vancouver Divorce” by Gordon Downie, from his under-appreciated first solo album:
Gordon Downie’s first solo album sort of got lost in the fact that he was also releasing a book of poetry to go with it, which is about as far away from the hockey arena venues of his day job in the Tragically Hip as you can get. When it stays on track though Coke Machine Glow is a really good album, or rather it has good songs.
That album features a number of good songs, including “Canada Geese”, “Lofty Pines” and the terrific “Chancellor”.
There are some other good suggestions in the comments, but to both the commenters and Jeffery’s shame, they omitted a classic song full of Vancouver place names: “The Crawl” by Spirit of the West.
The Gaelic romp details a drunken pub crawl across Vancouver’s North Shore, from the Troller in Horseshoe Bay to The Raven in Deep Cove. I see some folks recently replicated the crawl’s path in an epic bike ride.
I also remembered an obscure hockey song, entitled “What’s Wrong With Lumme?” by Glenn Ford and The Piers. I suppose that vaguely counts as ‘about Vancouver’, doesn’t it?
Simon Pavitt 
