The Decibel - A mixtape of you: the summer of the Great Canadian Playlist

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Canadians have been spending a lot of time thinking about identity and their relationship to Canada. As U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war drags on, taking an ‘Elbows Up’ approach isn’t just about economics – it’s also cultural. Many of the songs and albums that make up the soundtrack to your life are written and performed by Canadian artists – and they’ve helped shape what this country sounds like. Today, deputy arts editor Rebecca Tucker and reporter Josh O’Kane are here to talk about how they put together a list of 101 essential Canadian albums, and how the music we listen to reflects us as a country. We also called up Tamara Lindeman from The Weather Station, Joel Plaskett, and Torquil Campbell from Stars, all of whom were featured on that list, to tell us about the Canadian album that has inspired their work.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

I don't know about you, but I've been listening to less music in the last few months. Between the trade war and repeated threats by US President Donald Trump to make Canada the 51st state, we've spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be Canadian. It's all I can do to follow the news, so it's really been a season of podcasts for me. But we wanted to have a different kind of conversation about figuring out what it means to be Canadian in this moment. One that's less elbows up and more boogie down.

A few weeks ago, The Globe put out a list of 101 essential Canadian albums. So today, Rebecca Tucker, The Globe's Deputy Arts Editor, and Joshua Cain, an arts reporter, are here to talk about that list and how the music we listen to reflects us as a country and forges us too. We also asked a few musicians who are on this list about a Canadian album that has influenced their work. Later in the episode, you'll hear from Joel Plaskett and Torquil Campbell from STARS. But first, we'll start with Tamara Lindeman from The Weather Station. I'm guest host Adrian Lee, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

My name is Tamara Linnaman. I'm from the Weather Station and I'm a singer-songwriter. I make records and I live in Toronto. For some reason, the album that comes up in my mind right now is a bit of a deep cut. It's an album by the artist Jennifer Castle but it was from before she was named Jennifer Castle. She was called Castle Music and it's called You Can't Take Anyone. And she has this line of like you can't take anyone down into the fire. Like the sky is a ladder and it's made for one. I always think about that.

Just how there are experiences that you can't share. You know, there are things that are solitary in nature and just how kind of interesting it is to notice that in a song. It's a very like seminal record for me. Like I feel like it taught me how to write or like what was possible within writing. You know it felt like it this album was like here you can talk about these things in a song. This is what a song could be for. This album makes me think of this is what a song could be for. This album makes me think of all these other albums that are specific to Canada and Toronto in particular of sort of like philosophical questioning

in the context of a song, which I think is not as common outside of Canada. I mean, I think of like Mary Margaret O'Hara, Miss America, I think of like Bruce Coburn even, I think of like Mary Margaret O'Hara, Miss America. I think of like Bruce Coburn even. I think of like Leonard Cohen, the grandfather of questioning and questions within songs. It's like, what is Canadian identity? But I think this like questioning,

this sort of turning things over and over again feels to me so Canadian. And when I leave Canada, that's like the thing that I notice the most that's different is how much we question. Different countries have a national identity based around like a national myth or like a exceptionalism. And it's funny that we don't have that. And of course, there's the argument that And it's funny that we don't have that and of course, there's the argument that our Sense of ourselves is wrongly positive But I also think that there's something interesting in that of like it's the trying to do the right thing as a value

That is real and that you see when you meet people like it's there and that is completely different than like American identity I think that that still stands even as we try to reckon with the past and our history. Rebecca, Josh, thanks for joining us. Glad to be here. Very glad to be here. So the Globes list of 101 albums came out a few weeks ago, and it's been driving a lot of conversation. But we should probably start by talking about the conversations that made the list in the first place. Rebecca, how exactly did this list come together? So we did some outreach to, I think it was 12 or 15, of Canada's sort of top music writers and cultural

commentators. So we asked all of those folks to send us a ballot of 20 albums and any album that received three votes or more was an automatic in. There was also an eye to like making sure that we were presenting all of these albums as equally indispensable or equally listenable. You know, these are the 101 albums that you want to listen to to get some sense of Canada's evolving musical identity. And then the fun started. I mean, not to brag, but brag. I was one of the people you asked to contribute to the list. But for the purpose of this list, how did you determine what actually makes an album Canadian? Yeah that criteria can be subjective so we tried to make it as objective as possible by going to a third party. So we used the

Juno's criteria so it's the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. They classify an album as qualifying for a nomination if 50% or more of band members are Canadian or if it's determined that the major creative forces in a band are Canadian but there were probably questions about certain groups Yeah so it takes something like the band a band that I think a lot of people do think of as being Canadian because they are Prominently Canadian, but there's American members, but they definitely passed that 50% threshold So, you know, they made the ballots and they made the list

Yeah can't have a Canadian list like this without the band and not just all bands. Josh, something I think about a lot with these big lists is that they're always fundamentally acts of curation, but it feels like the best lists are also acts of construction and that's something that feels like you were trying to do here. You know, this isn't necessarily the 101 best Canadian albums, but 101 that tell a story and build an identity. It's very, this very active process. So was that your intention in going through this process?

There's no way you can really limit a list to just be a list of the best. There's so much subjectivity. What a list of essential albums achieves, I think, is a range of the breadth of Canadian music and Canadian experience, not to be a single definition of chart success or cult appeal or critical acclaim. To give a couple examples, it's important to me to eliminate any kind of hierarchy that might exist in a list like this between albums such as The Tragical Hips, Fully, Completely, or say Beverly Glenn Copeland's Keyboard Fantasies.

Like, the hip album is known by a massive swath of Canadians with bangers like 50 Mission Cap and Courage. But then you've got Keyboard Fantasies. It's a pioneering album of gorgeous synthesizer music originally self-released on a cassette and it's made by a black trans man who previously was well known for making music on Mr. Dress Up. That tape wound up becoming this deeply influential collector's item and across the 2010s went on to inspire artists ranging from Bon Iver to the Swedish pop star Robin.

One great example of a song from that record would be Ever New, which has these amazing cascading synthesizers. ["EVER NEW"] Yeah, were there challenges in balancing this idea of canon, which is what is central to us, and constructing this idea of identity coming from us at the Globe and Mail. Was there challenges associated with that

that you didn't expect? I don't know that I necessarily found it challenging, but I think that that was something that we were aware of, that there is definitely to like the Canadian pop culture consumer or to the Canadian music fan, unestablished canon of what Canadian music is. And I think that canon was established 50 years ago, Neil Young,

Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. You can sort of name them, right? And I think that maybe the challenge that we gave ourselves was to not only ensure that those albums should be on the list because they 100% should, they're Canadian canon for a reason, but to make sure that we were balancing those albums with our own input with music and artists that reflect Canada's evolving music industry for sure, but also Canada's diversity. We've got a lot of queer artists on the list,

we've got indigenous artists on the list, we've got hip hop artists and artists of color that might not necessarily have been reflected on the list if we just stuck to the canon. But I think that you can see the evolution of Canadian identity within a list like this. And like the list is dynamic, you know, it's static for now. But in 10 years, if we put together another list, we'd have another decade to tack on and you would see that evolution even further, I would hope.

Yeah. And Josh, you talked about this being about Canadian albums and Canadian music specifically. But at the same time, we're also here a lot about how these albums were influential. The other musicians they influenced and impacted. You talked about Robin, for instance, just now. And that kind of reflects to me this kind of classically Canadian held idea that maybe we only matter in the context of other people and often American people. Why was broader influence such a major criterion?

For me personally, it was a way for us to show the true power of Canadian music that if you may not have heard of something, but it could influence one of your favorite artists. Like as an example would be Anvil, this Toronto-based metal band from the 1980s was their heyday. They had an album called Metal on Metal that deeply influenced the generation and explosion of thrash metal in the 80s like Metallica and Slayer. The average listener of the great Canadian songbook probably hasn't listened to metal on metal, but they should at least understand that this incredible work of art, even if it's not to your taste, was made here, was dreamed up here. And that's

an important thing for Canadians to know that there's so much happening beyond their own bubbles that there's this world of opportunity of listening out there. We'll be right back. beyond their own bubbles that there's this world of opportunity of listening out there. We'll be right back. My name is Joel Plaskett. I'm a songwriter from Nova Scotia. Probably my favorite Canadian album, and I'm sure this is a lot of folks too. People are no stranger to it. But Joni Mitchell's Blue is a really, really important record in my life and has been since I was a teenager.

That's the North Star. As constant as a Northern Star would be that album. It sort of fulfilled that role in my life. So I love it very much. A Case of You, you know, has the sort of, you know, famous line, on the back of a cartoon coaster in the blue TV screen light. I drew a map of Canada. Oh Canada. With your face sketched on it twice. That lyric, you know, is one of those sort of, I don't know, I mean, just as a Canadian and just with the poetry of it and the visual of this coaster, all of it, I mean, it's perfect. It's just one of those absolutely iconic and emotional lines that,

for me, just kind of will always hold as the center of that album. But the whole record for me is just lyric upon lyric that matters. Here's what Joel had to say about how he's thinking about what it means to be Canadian right now. Just in terms of the national conversation, I mean, I think what we're living in a pretty wild time of heavy national sentiments all around the world. And so, I hold mine loosely, you know, but it's also I think there's something about music and art that I think does relate to where you are, certainly

does for me. I won't speak on behalf of anybody else, but in my own life, where I've been, where I live and in Canada, my art's been deeply informed by that. I've been on sort of a recent kick reading Marshall McLuhan's work, Understanding Media, and specifically, and there's something he sort of talks about the do line, the distant early warning line, which is sort of the line up north where they would detect incoming missiles or traffic, air traffic and things like that. But talking about art as a distant early warning system, so it's like an antenna. The artist has their antenna in the air and starts to pick up on things before they reach everyone else in. And I like that idea that not just music, but just in general, if you're sensitive to changes in the environment, just changes to

the world that we're in, I think sometimes people can sometimes feel something coming on the horizon and then try to telegraph it. Joni Mitchell certainly does. There's something about her music that, you know, when I think of A Case of You that, I mean, the resonance across time for it, there's something that she captured at that moment that is of the time that she was living in, but somehow telegraphs something greater, kind of across time in space. We were talking earlier about what makes an album Canadian, and of course we do have policy around this question.

Josh, how do our policies shape the music industry that we have in Canada? Yeah, so in 1971 these rules came into force. Canadian content rules, call them CanCon, sometimes that's used derivatively, and it has always had its critics, but what it's done is sort of set up our for a certain minimum, you know, this is the 70s, so we're talking like radio broadcasters at the time, by sort of forcing Canadian broadcasters to play a minimum of Canadian content under those rules. It kind of helped strengthen the Canadian music industry.

It paved the way for more recording studios and labels and music companies and created the infrastructure that has led to a significant amount of Canadian music because pre-1971 you had a lot of the great artists move away, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and even the band, to a certain extent. They didn't have the infrastructure. There was some infrastructure, but this allowed for an industry to thrive.

Yeah, and of course it's complicated today. Sort of the only way folks can listen to this list is to use, I guess, an American or Swedish streaming platform there's always these things like you mentioned with the band it's no no one is 100% born raised made in Canada so are there recent developments in policy that are trying to reflect the current complication yeah so it's been I think a couple of years since the online streaming act was passed by Ottawa to modernize these Canadian content rules. And it's currently up to the CRTC to figure out how these new rules are going to be employed. But basically,

there's just a bunch of fights happening all at the same time about how this should be deployed, how to redefine Canadian content. And so the CRTC hasn't issued its final recommendations for how to proceed with that. But you've also right now got some of the biggest streamers in the world, including Spotify and Apple. They've been trying to overturn the need to contribute some of their revenue towards the Canadian content ecosystem with a federal court of appeal right now. So we're waiting for that decision to try to get a sense of how much these organizations will need to contribute to the Canadian ecosystem. And Josh, if you look at this list as a whole then, in this sort of broader context, what kind of picture does it paint about what it means to be Canadian to you?

I think what it does is shows the sheer variety of Canadian-ness and the variety of Canadian experience. So, yes, you've got the great Canadian songbook, you've got Gordon Lightfoot, you've got Joni Mitchell, you've got the hitmakers, you've got Shania Twain and Celine Dion, but you've got artists who really helped bring, say, hip-hop to the fore in Canada. We've got Dream Warriors and Now the Legacy Begins with great songs like My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style. Now what's my definition? My definition, my definition. My definition is this.

Or, you know, you've got Rascals, Global Warning, their giant album release after their first huge hip-hop posse cut that they led, Northern Touch. And then you've got artists such as Willie Dunn, the Mi'kmaq and Scottish folk musician whose self-titled album from the 70s included I Pity the Country. It's a song that eviscerates institutional and colonial racism against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Silly civil servants, they thrive off my body. Their trip is with power, backbaking and welfare. I think it's important to include examples on this list that don't just celebrate Canada but also question the idea of Canada in the first place. And we have some Indigenous artists who have made records that are included on the list that show that. I pity the country, I pity the state, and the mind of a man who thrives on hate. We called up Torquil Campbell from the band Stars to ask which Canadian album has been

most influential to him. My name is Torquil Campbell and I play in the band Stars. An album by a Canadian artist that has influenced my work is an album called Last Exit by a band called Junior Boys from Hamilton. I had grown up as an English-born person in 80s Toronto, being a massive Anglophile and loving music from Europe and from England and feeling very disconnected from the music that was happening in Canada at the time. And the Junior Boys record was sort of the first time I had ever heard a band, there were other

records that I loved from Canada, like Mary Margaret O'Hara's record. There was a band called Five Guys Named Mo that made an amazing record. Chaos's first record is an absolutely crucial Canadian record in my opinion. But the Junior Boys record, the first Junior Boys record felt like it had come out of nowhere in terms of the lineage of what had happened in the country prior to that. And the icy coldness of it and the industrialness of it and the emphasis on a feeling of disconnection really captured the way I felt about Toronto and about Hamilton and the whole Golden Horseshoe. There's a lot of dystopian aspects to living in a megalopolis like that. And I think it was the first truly kind of urban pop record that I'd

heard made in Canada. There's a song I think called Birthday. It's just, it's, you know, it's Jeremy Greenspan's vocals. Jeremy Greenspan's vocals were silky. They were blue-eyed soul. They were feminine in a way that male vocals had not been before. And I really related to that because that's how I sing too and that's how I learned to sing pop music or how I found my voice in pop music is through a notion of kind of androgyny that the voice was supposed to be an avatar for anyone who was listening to the song. We asked Torquil how these conversations we're having about Canadian identity are landing for him as an artist.

I hate countries and I hate questions of identity. I think they are a hindrance to the revolution. We are all together in this world and the ones we should oppose are clear and Canadian identity is frankly, given our history, a joke. I mean, oh, we don't like it when people say they're going to invade us? Yeah, I bet that must suck when people invade you. Should ask around. To some people who've been in Canada for several thousand years, how it feels. If we are going to talk about a notion of identity, then we should refer to the people who have really pondered these questions, and Gord Gowney comes to mind. Gord tried to imagine Canada as

a single place, which of course it isn't. And in doing that he acknowledged that it isn't a single place, that it's this ineffable millions of nations and millions of countries and different weather and different environments and different reasons for being there and all these things. But this searching nature and this attempt to connect to one another despite the distance and despite the difference is, if anything makes somebody Canadian, it's that. It's not easy to know what being a Canadian is because there's no one around. But the essence of this messed up, lost place

is that reaching for connection. And Gordon spent his entire life, whether he was on stage or off stage, trying to understand people he met and trying to connect with them. Jump into the ride Then I jump to land Okay, so this was, you know, this deeply human project, right? This list is no algorithms were involved, which seems kind of rare in our current moment.

Yep, that's right. No algorithms, no AI, just a series of like increasingly convoluted spreadsheets and that resulted in, I mean, between like myself and Josh and we were joined by arts editor Judith Pereira and Brad Wheeler who's been the Globist music writer for decades in whittling down these lists and shortening these spreadsheets and collating them onto different spreadsheets and like the debates were fun and the debates were long and there came to a point in all of these debates where like you sort of not necessarily

like lost your fight but it's just okay we need to move on from this album we're striking this one for the record or okay you can have this one you know like it's a lot of fun and we all had a huge emotional investment in getting this project done and like making it the best list and a list that we could all stand by. But like, yeah, there gets a point where you're like, I'm tired of talking about this, you can have it. Let's move on to the next album. Well noteworthy, one of the people you mentioned who was not involved in that argumentative

process was Adrian Lee. And of course, I'm like so deeply magnanimous about that, and I like, absolutely did not ask to guest host this episode and attempt to force my way into the room where it happened. But, uh, you know, granting all of that, let's recreate some of that vibe. Let's talk about the album that did not make this list that you really wanted to be on it.

Josh, I want to start with you. In 30 seconds, can you make the case for an album that you wanted and did not make the cut? This one was contentious. Big shiny tunes to the much-music compilation that clandestinely got an entire generation to admire Canadian songs like Brant Van 3000's Drinking in L.A. wetched between hits from Radiohead and Blur. What the hell am I doing drinking in L.A. at 26? It is contentious. I can't believe you would even mention Big Shiny Tunes 2. To me, it taught a generation of Canadians that an album should smuggle in Canada like it's some sort of secret medicine amidst a whole bunch of American, British pop candy. That is literally what the Can Con rules did, right?

Mm. Well, you said it was a good thing. It built on our heritage. Mm. Rebecca? So, the album that I really wanted to make it on this list and did not make it on was Has a Good Home by Final Fantasy, the stage name of Owen Pallett, who is like a violin virtuoso, if you've ever seen them live the way that they loop and syncopate the violin into like these fully realized pop songs it's exceptional one such example and I think

maybe like the best example of them doing this is on this album this is the dream of one and regime it's an extraordinary piece of music, beautiful pop song. And they're also an example of one of those artists that's what we were talking about earlier with Canadians influencing global artists. Like Owen Pallett has done orchestration for Taylor Swift, for The National, for Ed Sheeran, a secretly influential artist. Although I realize now saying this, being sort of secretly Canadian is a theme here

between your big shiny tunes and my Final Fantasy. I think that there is this tendency of Canadian artists to play little brother a little bit, right? And like a lot of Canadian artists seem to, or maybe the general public does, qualify success as breaking it south of the border. And I guess I kind of just did that with my Final Fantasy album, you know, Owen Pallet is someone who has worked with a lot of international artists. And I think it's something that we

probably tried to move away from with this list is talking about artists that are successes in their own right and have influenced other artists rather than found success because of their associations with with other artists out of the border or overseas. Justin Bieber's Sorry was definitely another album that we had fought over fought over for last-minute inclusion. You guys when you're talking about sorry you mean purpose the album purpose featuring song sorry yeah you can make an argument I could make the argument that Justin Because when you're talking about Sorry, you mean Purpose, the album Purpose. Purpose, yes. Featuring the song Sorry. Yeah. You can make an argument, I could make the argument, that Justin, that's a very Canadian album because what he's talking about is the struggles he's had since leaving Canada.

It's all like deeply interwoven with his coming up from Stratford. Yeah, and also because the single's called Sorry. Yeah, fair enough. Well, thanks for mentioning the albums that you really fought for. Unfortunately, they're all the wrong answer, because the most correct answer is Shania Twain's Up. To me, the thing that's wild about it is that she was at the peak of her powers when she released this, it was like early 2000s, and released three versions of this album at the same time. Do you know this? A pop one, a country one, and a quote, international

version, which was the same songs but completely remixed with sitar and flute. And it just says something about a very specific time and understanding about what diversity is in Canada, I think, at that particular time. So we'll leave our listeners with the Bollywood version of Shania Twain's Up. It's about as bad as it could be. Josh and Rebecca, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. That was Rebecca Tucker, The Globe's deputy arts Editor, and Joshua Cain, an arts reporter

for the Globe. You also heard from Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station, Joel Plaskett, and Torquil Campbell of STARS. That's it for today. I'm your guest host, Adrian Lee. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. This episode was mixed by Kevin Sexton. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pacenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening.