Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

I still remember it well.

It was Tuesday, May 24, 2016.

You know how when you're on a plane and you land, the flight attendant says that it's now

permissible to use transmitting

and receiving functions on your portable devices while you're taxing to the gate.

I just landed on a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong, and as soon as I flicked my phone out of

airplane mode, it just blew up. Emails and texts, all about one thing. The tragically hip had just announced that

their singer, Gord Downey, had brain cancer. Now, at first, this didn't make sense. Had the

jet leg already kicked in? Was this some kind of hoax? I mean, this was Gord. He was practically

a Canadian superhero. Nothing like this was supposed to happen to him, but was Gord. He was practically a Canadian superhero.

Nothing like this was supposed to happen to him.

But it was true. The emails and texts kept popping up.

Dozens, hundreds of them.

And we all know how the next 18 months played out.

When Gord left us in October 2017, it was really rough. The best tweet I saw that day was Canada closed, death in the family. And the country spent the next week trying to explain to the rest

of the world how a singer of a rock band had brought an entire nation to tears, even the prime minister.

Where else in the world is something like this happened?

The answer is that you have to be a special kind of person, an artist, a writer, a thinker,

an activist, and a poet.

This is the story of Gore Downey, Canada's own rock poet.

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