American and European cities have a million songs written about them. Yet I’ve never heard “I Left my Heart in Saskatoon,” “Calgary, Calgary!,” or “I Wish They all Could be Prince Edward Island Girls.” If such songs do exist, most of us here in the states have never heard them.
I can’t even recall a single Rush song (they’re from Toronto) that mentions a Canadian city. They mention Hollywood and Las Vegas (Dreamline), and Manhattan and Westminster (The Camera Eye), but nothing about Canada. Granted, I haven’t heard their whole catalog, so I could be wrong.
In several minutes of racking my brain, the closest I can come is CSN&Y’s song Helpless, which begins with the line “There is a town in north Ontario.”
There must be some songs here I’m not thinking of. Help me out here, Dopers, if you please.
There’s the obvious one by the Guess Who - “Running Back to Saskatoon”, and the Arrogant Worms also have a song called (I believe) “I Hate Toronto”, which, to us Westerners, is pretty darned funny.
Well, there’s always the band Toronto. I don’t recall if they ever mentioned the city in one of their songs, but surely they must get some bonus points for naming themselves after a Canadian city.
I’m also going to award Feynn bonus points for singing “All My Ex’s Live in Calgary” on karaoke night.
Well done, Featherlou; I was going to say “Running Back to Saskatoon” myself. It mentions plenty of Canadian cities in the lyrics too.
Stompin’ Tom has done songs about many places–“Sudbury Saturday Night” and “Tillsonburg” are two with city names in the title.
And does anybody remember a group called Chilliwack? They named themselves after a BC city.
If we can expand to include not just cities but also provinces and areas, what about “Alberta Bound”? And Tanglefoot did “The Drunken Dummer Survey” about an Ontario township.
The Guess Who’s song is actually called “Home Grown”
The Tragically Hip “Bobycageon” (sp)
Connie Kaldor “Saskatoon Moon”
Neil Young’s “Helpless” “There is a town in North Ontario”
As an aside, Bruce Springsteen’s “Lucky Man” mentions Calgary.
And for the record, the only song I can think of which comes close is “Big Boned Gal” by k.d. lang, which mentions “southern Alberta” or “south Alberta” but no specific city. The song got some airplay on alternative stations 'round these parts.
Yes, that’s true, but it doesn’t mean the songs aren’t popular here.
What I was trying to say, in my clumsy and possibly antagonistic way, was that I don’t know what songs are popular where you live. Rush and k d langare popular, but The Tragically Hip and The Guess Who aren’t? Who knew?
Spend some time in Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, or Regina, and you’ll see why there’s no songs you’ve ever heard of written about those places. The Sleeping Giant? The Golden Boy? Wascana Lake? Oi.
Also, Americans aren’t really all that interested in things distinctly Canuck. Except when you steal our hockey players with your powerful American dollar.
The Posies have a song on their album Amazing Disgrace called “Ontario” which rips on the Neil Young song. First verse goes:
“Well you told me where you wanted to go,
You said take me to Ontario;
Well you told me what you wanted to be,
You said the flowers that you planted in me had gone dry.
Big birds flying overhead,
Who gives a shit?”
It is. It’s been many years since I worked in Canadian radio, but when I did, we had to play 30% Canadian content. Not sure what it is now, or what the rules are now either.
But it meant that you had to do a little bit of digging through the library, lest you play nothing but Rush, April Wine, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young. And there were some surprising pieces of music that you turned up–some of them have been mentioned here, but you’d also find bands you might never have heard of, spoke: Klaatu, Foot in Cold Water, Crowbar, Gowan, the Bells, and Five Man Electrical Band are a few that come to mind.
Besides that, you’d get new releases that we all pounced on as soon as they came in the door. Anybody remember the Parachute Club, Jane Siberry, BB Gabor, or Martha and the Muffins (had to love the Metro Music album cover: a Soviet Intelligence map of Toronto with all the streets named in Cyrillic).
These artists were all quite popular in Canada in their day and some of them still are. I remember seeing Larry Gowan play to a packed house at the Kingswood Music Theatre (just north of Toronto) in the late 1980s, and people turned away from BB Gabor’s club dates in the early 80s. And even recently, Bob Segarini, Greg Godovitz, and Grant Fullerton (ex Lighthouse) have been doing club dates together–and these guys are still packing them in.
I guess the CanCon regulations made them popular here, spoke, but for various reasons, not all of them made it in the US. But perhaps the term “popularity” is in the eye of the beholder. Or the ear of the listener.
