Teva Harrison RIP

Teva Harrison died on the unseasonably cold, final weekend of April 2019. She was 42. She died of the disease that had plagued her for the past five years, the disease to which she refused to surrender her spirit, the disease she fought with her voice and her art. Metastatic breast cancer stole Teva Harrison’s body from this world. But her voice and her art and her spirit are very much alive.

I didn’t know Teva Harrison, not like many other people in Toronto did. My lady had bought her book, In Between Days, because it had had such rave reviews and many of our friends spoke so highly of her. The book wasn’t in our house because we were intensely curious about cancer; it was in our house because it was written and illustrated by Teva Harrison. It’s a lovely book, on many levels.

I later met her through mutual friends at a Dolly Parton concert. She was a beautiful woman: with dimples and deep-blue eyes and a sparkle that my friend Alex Molotkow described as “Glinda-like” (as in, The Wizard of Oz), which is incredibly accurate. But she was beautiful primarily because of her spirit, her empathy, her radiance and charisma, all of which was instantly evident to anyone who met her. Her friends are mourning, privately and on social media, but what’s striking is the number of journalists who are also mourning, people who interviewed her for only about an hour, an hour they remember intimately with deep affection. Because you didn’t forget a conversation with Teva Harrison.

In 2017, I was writing a biography of Gord Downie, who had decided to do a final tour with the Tragically Hip after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Downie had only given one interview in the last two years of his life. I didn’t (yet) know anyone living with a terminal disease, and I wanted to talk to Teva about her book and the act of being very open about living with an incurable disease. Downie’s act was so unusual because most people retreat into the shadows after such a diagnosis; Teva’s work questioned what we as a society suffer when we let people just disappear, when we refuse to talk about disease and our own mortality, what we try to consciously ignore. Downie’s act was one of defiance, and millions of Canadians were swept up in his journey. Teva’s work was equally defiant, and considerably more candid and explicit.

I had no idea if she had any strong feelings about Downie and his work, but I asked her if she would talk to me about discussions of death in the public sphere. I also wanted to gain some insight into an intensely creative person determined to “use it up, use it all up,” as Downie’s hero Raymond Carver wrote during his own terminal diagnosis.

In 2016, Teva had told Chatelaine’s Katie Underwood, “I don’t want to talk about cancer all the time. I want to talk about art, books, culture and politics — the same things I was interested in before. I don’t feel like a dying person, so I’ve had a hard time getting into the mindset that that’s essentially what I am. But not yet.” And in a phenomenal speech she gave in 2016—the text of which I’d argue is even better than her book—she said, “When we have art and conversation about illness and disability, we’re giving give to a crucial part of the human experience. By listening to these voices, we can gain a truer perception of our own advantage and luck.”

I was lucky to have a chance to listen to Teva Harrsion.

I spent the summer of 2017 talking about death with other people who were watching a friend and colleague and national icon fade away in front of them. Most of our conversations ended in tears. My conversation with Teva was just as emotional and moving and funny and sad, and I felt buoyed as I left her house that afternoon, ready to see so much of the magic in everyday life that she saw all the time.

She complimented me on the colour of the dress shirt I was wearing; it was the illustrator’s favourite shade of blue. I had to confess that I wore it on purpose, because it was on the cover of her book. I knew what joy she brought to many people suffering in the same ways she was; if I could bring the tiniest bit of joy into her house in exchange for a bit of her precious, precious time, I figured it was the least I could do.

Teva Harrison

June 28, 2017

At her house near Bloor/Dovercourt

Does the Tragically Hip mean anything to you, as someone who grew up in America?

On the record (laughs)? No. But I see what they mean to other people. As a kid, they didn’t make it to where I live. I see what place they occupy for so many Canadians, and it’s amazing to me how diverse the people are who find something really meaningful in their music.

Your book came out one month before Downie’s diagnosis became public. Did the news strike you as odd or meaningful, in any way, when someone with a terminal diagnosis decides to go on tour?

It’s so different for all of us, what one person is capable of. I have a friend who has metastatic breast cancer like me, and she had no evidence of the disease for a few years. She was living normally. Then she took a hard downward slide. She’s been going through this inner conflict about, ‘Was I being able-ist, with being so vocal about being able to do X, Y and Z?’ You don’t know what someone else is capable of. There are ways to manage to still do things, even though you can’t do everything. I have to take proactive rest; I’m betting the same is true for Gord Downie. He has to factor in how many things he does in order to do the really fantastic public things he does. That’s just based on my personal experience. It’s hard, though. My book tour was hard. I’ve never been a musician, but I can only imagine that it’s more physically taxing.

How far did your tour take you, and what demands did it place on you?

I made it to Dawson City and Whitehorse and Yellowknife and Vancouver and Calgary and Edmonton and Montreal. My publicist knew I needed rest days. It was a lot, but it was worth it. It’s about deciding if it’s worth it to you, and wanting to have the experience. I didn’t want to say no to having interaction with people around the work. I expect that’s probably universal, wanting to engage in the most meaningful moments while you have the ability.

Did you watch any footage of the Tragically Hip tour, or were you remotely interested in seeing someone play it out publicly?

I didn’t, and if I thought about it that way I might have. I don’t know any of the songs, you know? All of my friends were going to shows and sobbing in parks and it was a beautiful thing that I didn’t know how to tap into, because I didn’t grow up with [the music]. It felt like a real gift to everybody who got to be there.

What do you think it meant to those friends, that they wanted to experience it publicly?

Like in all these parks and places? It was an interesting moment. It’s uniquely Canadian in a really charming way.

Whenever you have death of a beloved artist, as fans there is something very selfish about it. We want more from them. These people have given us so much, and we want another book from them, to see them in another film, we want another record.

One more show!

Yes, and this stuff last summer was a whole other level of processing, of witnessing the in-between days in front of us, and having that shared experience. ‘You want one more show? Well, now you’ve got one.’

It’s incredible, I think. I can see it as being both generous and selfish. If music was my life, I would want one more show, too, in the same way that I want to do so many more drawings and write so much more. It’s special. We don’t get that wish fulfillment often. We don’t have warning. Nobody knew that would be Prince’s last show in Toronto [in April 2016, mere weeks before he died.] I had tickets to Aretha Franklin, and she had to cancel [Franklin died a year later].

You write about how, for the first year, you didn’t tell anybody about your diagnosis who didn’t need to know. Did you have any trepidation about talking about it so publicly?

I did. When I started doing the work that turned into In Between Days, it was really just for me. It was a way of processing. I think I’m lucky in that I was raised by people who believe deeply in doing things that have some positive outcome or benefit to the community. [My family are] socialists from way back! When people suggested to me that the drawings might be helpful to other people, I thought about it a few ways. I thought I could have only a tiny bit of time left. What am I afraid of? How is being public going to make it worse? Whatever I was afraid of was just gone.

Before this happened, were you a very private person?

I’ve always been more private with the dark stuff. Which is not unusual, and social media encourages us to share the good stuff and keep the rest to ourselves. I’ve never felt like people needed to know the bad parts. Then I was in a position where it was so bad, so dark, and I was so sad, and I felt alone with my feelings. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to share the work, because I thought if someone else is feeling alone with their feelings and they happen to pick up my book and it makes them say, ‘Yeah, me too!’ then maybe that’s worth it.

You are—no offence!—of limited celebrity. What do you think it means when someone who plays a large role in the culture goes public in such a performative way?

We don’t talk about it. There is benefit to this being more public. I don’t consider myself a celebrity at all! I feel fantastic and honoured to have written a book, but that doesn’t make me as public a person as someone like Gord Downie. I’m sure you’ve read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, about the way we kept silent, as a culture, about cancer. You know, [doctors] didn’t even used to tell people who were diagnosed that they had cancer, because they didn’t want [the patients] to worry about it, and [doctors] knew they were going to die anyway. But not talking about something doesn’t make it less scary, it makes it loom larger.

You’ve said, “We’re encouraged to slip away because people generally prefer it that way … What is lost when we allow sick people to disappear?” What do you think society loses when we don’t acknowledge illness?

I think we lose the depth of the human experience. How can we live with only one side? The extremes of emotion—extreme joy and extreme grief—are where our deepest commonalities exist, no matter where that joy or grief comes from. That’s where we meet. By not talking about it, we are limiting the depth of our connections with other people, our own opportunities to feel and live. But I also think we lose the stories and knowledge and experience of a person. We don’t have as much of a sit-around-and-tell stories culture. Maybe that’s part of why Gord Downie being so public is so meaningful to people, because he’s a major national storyteller, one of Canada’s biggest. That warm invitation that storytelling gives, that foundation of community, is part of what we’re losing, part of what we’re trying to hold on to.

During that tour, there were many lines scattered throughout his work that suddenly made our ears perk up. It had always been there. You talk about being on the subway and suffering invisible pain; if you had crutches or something, people would offer you a seat, but nobody knows your story.

Having illness in the public sphere creates compassion, because we can never know what these hidden stories are that everybody has. It could be depression, it could be your organs, it could be anything that doesn’t manifest itself on our exterior shells, and we’re trained not to look beyond the surface. But the more these stories are shared, we can build compassion. Not even medical stories: you don’t know what’s happening in people’s lives, or how they came to live in this city, what they’ve lived through. [We go on a tangent about Kathleen Hanna and Lyme disease, another invisible ailment.]

You found a lump and went to the hospital. Do you think you could have been diagnosed earlier?

I try not to dwell. I applied sometime before for the Ontario early detection program, because of my family [history]. But [the cancer] wasn’t first-generation, and I came three points short of their algorithm to get an early mammogram. I had early ultrasounds, which are supposed to be good, but they didn’t catch this. It’s possible that if I had access to more specific tests that it might have been caught earlier. Misdiagnoses happen even more often when we’re younger. We’re not put through the same level of tests older patients are put through. It’s why I slipped through the cracks. It wasn’t found until I was Stage 4.

Is there an age at which it’s automatic?

Yes. I think it’s fortysomething. But we have no idea how long I was walking around with cancer.

Breast cancer is so common I can see why there would be routine tests. But I can’t imagine there is for brain, colon, oral cancers.

No. It can take a long time to figure out what’s wrong with somebody. Some cancers are really sneaky. Pancreatic cancer hides, and is difficult to diagnose. [Note: pancreatic cancer is what took Sharon Jones.]

You’ve said you have “more hunger for life and experiences,” and you write, “I really have nothing to lose. So I am going to say yes even more. Live like a tornado, when I can. I’m going to suck the marrow out of life and see what I’ve been missing.” When you talk to people in public forums, do you hear the flip side of that? Can it give people a complex or worry that they’re not doing enough?

I don’t think it’s a flip side. I think it’s connected. I feel like that feeling that you’re not doing enough drives you to do too much, or as much as you can. I’m about to have a show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, I’m working on a new art project, I’m writing another book, I’m writing a cook book, I’m collaborating with Jordan Tannahill on his project—you know? It’s frantic.

Why do you think that is?

Because I thought I had a lot more time to do it all. Sometimes people say, ‘I don’t know how you do it. I could barely get here today.’ Sometimes I’m that person who can barely do it. It depends what you’re willing to do, and how important it is to you. Obviously there are times when you simply can’t, when you have mobility issues, for example. My palliative care doctor gives me Ritalin to use if I have a speaking engagement and I’m so tired I can’t do it. It’s not ideal, but there are ways to fake it.

Regarding pain medication and opioids, as a creative person, how do these palliative medicines affect your creativity?

Not anymore. The opioids don’t have the same effect they had in the beginning. They just take away pain now. In the beginning, if I suddenly had to dramatically increase my dose, I would experience that again, but it’s so gradual now. In the beginning I had problems with it moving around so dramatically; it was trying to find the right levels and the right drug combinations. I also use medical marijuana, and that’s more likely to take away some of my [creative] impetus. But sometimes I have to eat! [Cannabis increases appetite.] It’s a very strange thing. I used to not be a person who liked to take pills for things. I liked to be really clear. I’ve had to accept that it’s part of the recipe for getting through the day. It is interesting how the body changes, how you slide into new normals.

I hear a lot of creative people, many of whom have mental health issues, who worry about prescribed drugs dulling that edge, not allowing them to access the parts of their brain that are so brilliant. But you’re saying that was more of a hump in the beginning.

Yeah, but it will come up again. When there are changes to my status with my disease, I had some progression and the tumour in my liver grew to the size where it was pressing against both my stomach and my ribcage. It hurt so much that for a while I had to double my opioid dose, and for that period of time I was barely a person. That was just a few months ago. It’s shrunk back down with a new treatment. You have to be highly adaptive. If you’re not able to roll with it, it could make you crazy. You have to accept that it’s difficult.

[Teva wrote an incredible essay about her medicinal use of fentanyl for The Walrus here.]

You’ve talked about rest being a torment, as white noise that accumulates until you require a creative release. Do you think that’s common, or unique to you as a creative person?

I think it’s a common experience, but then again I haven’t had a lot of people echo it to me. A lot of people talk to me about anxiety, though, and that’s a facet of anxiety. Almost everybody I’ve been close to who had cancer has talked about their anxiety and how they manage it. Whether or not they describe it as white noise, there is something that is pressing.

Did you have that before your diagnosis?

I had it before when I was not in the right place, if that makes sense. When I make choices or not be doing enough creatively. I don’t experience as much white noise as when I’m successfully creative.

I’ve heard Gord Downie talk about this a long time ago, before any of this, about how in between records or writing spells that this hum just builds in his head until he starts writing.

That’s exactly it! It’s like off-gassing.

You’ve said that opioids take the pain from a level 7/10 to a level 3.

Yes. But it’s a bit of a misrepresentation. I regularly get chided from my palliative care nurse for undermedicating myself. [The state of having] fully no pain leaves me a little cloudy. To get to that point I’d have to take so much more, to get to the point of no pain. Then I’d need that much just to get to 3 again. There are strategies around switching which opioids you’re taking for a period of time to resensitize you so you can stay on lower levels. That’s to avoid some of the side effects of opioid use, like constipation and sluggishness. I take a little bit less than I probably could, but not necessarily should. I don’t think I would value my time as much if it was just passing by. Maybe I wouldn’t care as much.

I’m sure some people do that.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. I’m sure my nurse is right when she says I should be feeling no pain.

I’ve been reading a novel by Hugh McLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night, and in it there is a character who’s had a brush with death, and it’s up to her husband and her lover to decide whether to risk a medical procedure to extend her life. They decide that she “must be enabled to live her own death,” because “her life isn’t completed yet. She wants to paint more pictures.”

It’s a strange pivot. I’m 3½ years into this, and I’m still not reconciled. It makes me understand why they didn’t tell people [they had cancer]. It changes how you live. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse. You’re simultaneously living your life but engraving your own death. Which feels like it should negate itself in a way. 

There’s a positivity in your book, yet fully acknowledging the dark and imminent end.

That’s part of why the subtitle is “living with cancer.” Because it’s not about dying. It’s a book about getting life-altering, heartbreaking news and figuring out how to move forward and still live with joy and with wonder. And getting the most one can out of what’s available. In a way, [my husband] David and I are lucky that we don’t have kids, because it means we can do things now that we probably wouldn’t be able to do. We can spend money going on amazing trips. Whereas a lot of people I know who are living with late-stage cancer are also living with a lot of debt or responsibility with their kids, all of these things that are also wonderful—kids, more than debt (laughs)—but are potentially hindering their ability to live their death out in a fully beautiful way, to the best of their potential. That to me is really heartbreaking. I do think that making dialogue wider and getting people talking more will make it more possible for people to speak up for themselves, even in the context of their own relationships, to self-advocate.

Cadence Weapon on Gord Downie, Bob Dylan and more

While writing The Never-Ending Present, I knew I’d have to talk about Gord Downie’s lyrics as poetry. His peers and other poets were happy to chime in on Downie’s relationship to Al Purdy’s work, or on whether or not Bob Dylan should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. But if we were going to be discussing lyrics as poetry, I knew I had to talk to some rappers as well.

One of my favourite writers and performers of recent years is Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a. Cadence Weapon, who spent two years as the municipally appointed poet laureate of his hometown of Edmonton, shortly before he relocated to Montreal and then Toronto. Cadence Weapon didn’t put out any new music in that time; the last time we heard from him was 2012’s Hope in Dirt City, shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. In January he released his new self-titled album, and it’s a huge step forward both musically and lyrically.

He and I spoke last September about poetry, Dylan, Downie, slam poetry and much more. But first, here’s my review of the new Cadence Weapon, which ran in the Waterloo Record on Jan. 19. He plays in Vancouver this weekend for JunoFest, on a bill with Maestro Fresh Wes and Clairmont the Second, and opens a series of dates for Too Many Zooz in late March, up and down the 401; he plays a free solo show at the University of Guelph on March 28 at noon.

Cadence Weapon – s/t (EOne)

Six years is a long time in the rap game. But that’s how long Cadence Weapon has been out of the visible (or audible) action, after spending time as the poet laureate of his hometown of Edmonton, moving to Montreal and collaborating with beatmakers Kaytranada and Jacques Greene while DJing loft parties, and finally relocating to Toronto, where he met the producer Harrison and the singer Brendan Philip. That journey through time, through cities, and through experiences is abundantly evident on his fourth album, one on which the former solo bedroom producer invites plenty of talented new friends into his process.

Cadence Weapon has always had a fascinating ability to absorb influences and emerge as a singular, unique talent. He doesn’t take his art for granted, and his judicious output illustrates just how much care goes into every track, every line, whether it’s traditional hip-hop braggadocio, avant-garde wordplay, or cinematic scene-setting. His fourth album is self-titled, a designation normally reserved for debuts that introduce an artist to the world. In this case, it’s a summation of his musical career to date, and he claims it’s also his most autobiographical. Cadence Weapon claims that he’s never bonded with other rappers, instead finding kindred spirits in electronic and experimental scenes—if true, that’s hip-hop’s loss. As both a producer and a rapper, Cadence Weapon gets better and better with age. 

Stream: “My Crew (Woooo)” feat. Kaytranada, “Destination” feat. Deradoorian, “The Host”

Rollie Pemberton

Sept 6, 2017

Loveless Café patio on Dundas Street West, Toronto

Are you a Tragically Hip fan?

I appreciate them just on a Canadiana level. I’d be lying if I said I was a fanatic. I watched the big performance on CBC. I played a Virgin Festival in Calgary, probably in 2007, 2008. That was my first time seeing them play. I was blown away, and I didn’t expect that. I had an idea of what they were, like good-ol’-boy Canadians, literate. Seeing that performance, it was very physical, which I didn’t anticipate. I was gripped. I knew “Ahead by a Century.” That was the era when I thought they were poppin’. I really like that song. The more I listen to their music, the more I connected with the lyrics. It’s all these Canadian references, but not cheezy. It’s considered and researched in a cool way. It’s so nerdy, in a way that is specifically Canadian.

It’s never flag-waving. He’s quite resistant to that.

They resisted that for so long: “We’re not like this.” But then you listen to their music and look at them, and you think, “You are the most Canadian people who ever lived!”

Part of what fascinates me about Gord Downie is his relationship to poetry and the written word, which is why I wanted to ask you about your experience as the poet laureate of Edmonton. How long has that position been around?

There had been two before me. It’s a two-year position.

As we saw with Bob Dylan’s Nobel, there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of a songwriter as a poet. I can only imagine that there’s even more to a hip-hop artist.

I caught a lot of flak. A lot of people thought it was weird that I would be nominated. It was a filmmaker, Trevor Anderson, who did it. In the arts community of Edmonton, it didn’t seem weird to me at all. At that time, I was arguably one of the best-known artists coming out of Edmonton, so who better to represent the word coming out of Edmonton than the rapper, right? But the interesting thing is the backlash I got from that really pushed me to be a better lyricist. I went way harder after that. The Globe and Mail had this piece comparing me to Shakespeare. They put all my lyrics beside Shakespeare’s, but my lyrics would be from one of my party tracks. I’m like: “This is totally not fair! Why don’t you get one of Shakespeare’s scribblings on a napkin? Let’s be fair here.” That was 2009-11. It made me be extremely considered about words I write, which was reflected in my last album.

Was a lot of that negative reaction from punters, or were actual poets or academics offended?

The previous poet laureate, this guy Ted Blodgett, he thought it was a joke. I never met him. He didn’t come to my appointment. The other previous poet laureate, Alice Major, did come, and she was very supportive. Some people get it, some people don’t. Even at the time, 2009, I felt this was such a dated, tired way of seeing rap. I didn’t think anyone in the world still felt like that.

Is poetry a precious thing only certain people can do on the page?

I’m very open. I published a book of poetry in 2013, Magnetic Days, with this company called Metatron. They are an alternative poetry press; they have people publishing their tweets as poetry. That exposed me to a lot of different things I didn’t know about, things that other people might not consider poetry. I started hosting these poetry events called Street Level in Montreal. I’m very open to what can be considered poetry. To me, there’s no manual, no test you have to pass before you listen to a Nas album. Writing words in general is the most creative expression you can have, and I think rap is the most creative genre for that reason. You can do literally anything, and as long as it rhymes, it’s rap. Even if it doesn’t rhyme! And the music itself is a self-referential genre, it’s constantly a meta thing, sampling other songs, or song structures from other genres. It’s a mutating creature of a genre. That’s what I loved about it. I feel the same way about poetry. Whenever I hear about somebody doing something different and other people claim it’s not poetry, I find those people are very scared and protecting themselves. The only time I could imagine rejecting somebody doing something new in a form would be if I was afraid I won’t survive.

How would you compare Gord Downie’s lyrics to other rock/pop/folk songwriters?

I’m a big Dylan fan. But it’s not the same. Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell—they’re not the same as Gord. They’re all in a similar continuum of pop songwriting, but they all have different styles.

This might seem like an odd question, but how important do you think lyrics are in hip-hop right now?

For some people it’s about having the right producer at the right time; it doesn’t matter what they’re saying at all. Rap right now is heavily led by production. If you don’t have dope beats, you can’t survive. There’s no underground rap world where people want scholarly lyrics. There are outliers like Kendrick, but to me he is satisfying this urge people have that’s similar to the rock bands who sound like old rock, like the White Stripes or something, a retro thing. “Look at him, he’s rapping really well—like they used to in the olden days!” It’s quaint, or something.

What are your writing influences beyond hip-hop?

One of my No.1 influences right now is Martin Newell. He’s a poet, but he’s mainly a musician. His group is the Cleaners from Venus. I became obsessed with this band six or seven years ago. All his albums were originally self-released, recorded on cassette in the early ’80s in England. He’s really prolific. I think he’s one of the best songwriters of our time. He had a lot of issues with labels. Eventually all his albums were reissued a few years ago, and people are starting to hear about him more. I think he’s an unheralded genius. He does a lot of character sketches, which are a big thing with me lately, writing stories about characters and creating worlds that way. He’s really good at that.

Dylan is a really big one for me. That was one of my gateway artists for pop music and folk music. I think he is for a lot of people. Obviously he has this public persona of being a cranky guy and keeping people on their toes, but his book Tarantula is super obtuse and impenetrable. That was very inspiring to me. It was something I’d never seen before. I knew beat poetry, but I’d never seen something that was so openly hostile to the reader. I really appreciate his openness to trying different things musically: going electric, country rock, he’s always moving, iconoclastic. That was very inspiring to me.

But a lot of that is his persona. What about his words?

He comes up with the illest lines. He has great kiss-off lines equal to any rapper’s. He has so many nasty tracks like that. All of Blonde on Blonde. It’s very much in the real world, but it transforms the real world into something outsized and mystical. Maybe it was all the speed. It’s this woozy funhouse mirror of real life. He illustrated that in such a cool way. He’ll say something really simple, but say it in a way that makes it unforgettable to me. On “Million Dollar Bash,” he says, “We’re going to get a little bit drunk.” The way he says “drunk” is the drunkest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

Neil Young is another one. Leonard Cohen. These guys made me very stoked to be Canadian, to realize we had this foundation of artistry. That was some of the first music I listened to that wasn’t rap. I grew up with rap. My dad was a rap DJ. My entire formative years were rap. Then it was Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots and grunge shit that led me to Neil Young; obviously there’s a connection there with Pearl Jam. Young is not dazzling. He isn’t going to come through with some crazy long words, or metaphors, or get complicated. But it’s self-assured and concise, very imagistic in a way. I was studying some of his lyrics, listening to After the Gold Rush. The title track and “Cripple Creek Ferry” were written for a soundtrack, for a movie that didn’t come out, and these lyrics have this weird narrative that nobody has picked up on. Neil is a bit corny, but I love that about him. I love that he sticks to who he is and doesn’t waver with the times.

My favourite songwriters change musically over time, because you have to do that to survive and to try different things, but they don’t change the core of what made them special, or how they operate. They remain true to themselves. A lot of people who do not do that, the public can sniff it out pretty easily. Another one is Walter Becker; I love Steely Dan. That to me is my ideal music: super literate, nerdy, but it’s funky. It’s hyper technical but doesn’t read like that. How do you get people who can shred like Van Halen, but get them to stay in the pocket? Usually you’re hyper technical but can’t write a song a human would like, or the opposite: you don’t have the chops, but you can appeal to a broad spectrum. Steely Dan had both. That to me makes them the ultimate band.

When Dylan won the Nobel, one of the arguments against the choice was that lyrics are not poetry because they are meant to be sung, that because they demand another medium they are not inherently poetry.

Ah, but we only say they’re meant to be sung because we know they’re sung. Right? If I were to pull someone off the street and show them Dylan lyrics, they would read it as poetry. They wouldn’t know it’s music, necessarily. A lot of people are splitting hairs. When something is different in a structure we’re aware of, even just a little bit off, everyone gets so up in arms.

[Next to the patio where we’re sitting, a man suddently starts slamming the door of a Toronto Sun newspaper box repeatedly in frustration]

This guy is a great example of that. He’s used to that box opening up, and now he’s freaking out. There wasn’t even a newspaper in it! It’s different from what he’s used to. “So if that’s not true, then what else is not true in my life?”

The world of poetry is small stakes. Poets are maligned, ignored. When someone who has an existing career in another medium says they’re going to publish a book of poetry, poets’ backs are necessarily going to stiffen.

But why do people get mad? [To those people, I’d say], don’t you love poetry? Want more people reading poems? Well, don’t get mad because someone else is successful. If you were so dope, you would have sold all those books. We live in a capitalist society. Nothing is holding people back from popping your book. And people wouldn’t buy it if it wasn’t good.

Sure they would. If it’s by a celebrity.

Not necessarily. I’m going to look first. If it’s “tic-tac-toe, ABC,” I’m not going to fucking buy it!

I don’t think Billy Corgan’s book did that well.

That’s what I’m talking about!

But Gord Downie holding the position he did in Canada, he could probably have sold anything.

He should have put out a sneaker.

I’m sure many people who bought his book have never bought another book of poetry in their life, but for others it can be a gateway into poetry.

That’s what Tarantula did for me. It made me seek out the history of poetry. At that time I was just writing poetry in my high school newspaper. I’d never read any poetry, really. I was just basing it on the hundreds of hours of rap I’d heard, and trying to say some fly shit. Now I have a background of knowledge that informs what I write today. That balance is really good: not being too scholarly, but not being too novice.

Until researching this topic, I’d totally forgotten that slam poetry was a thing in the ’90s. Where do you think that fits into this discussion?

There was a minor rift between people who considered themselves “page poets” and the slam poetry world. I remember Def Poetry Jam. That was cool. Dave Chappelle would come on and do a poem. That was great. I interviewed a guy for TIFF, he’s a screenwriter for this film Bodied. It’s about freestyle battle rap. It’s a fictionalized account of his life; he’s a battle rapper from Toronto. The way you picture it is not the way it is. It’s not 8 Mile. There’s no music. It’s like aggressive slam poetry, directed at an opponent with a boxing atmosphere. There’s a lot to unpack with that. Ultimately, words are very powerful. We idolize people who put them together in the right order.

Isn’t it more challenging to make poetry translate musically?

That’s something I’ve noticed change over time for me. I used to write in a different way than I do today. My first two albums, I didn’t have music first. I’d write lyrics and make music around that. Now I consider that an opposite way of doing things. It informs the way the music sounds: I didn’t marry these words to a beat. It has a jerky sensibility to it, but it also made it different. In terms of flow, people thought I was being willfully obtuse or not trying to rap properly. I lived without rules when I first came out.

You were Tarantula!

I was Tarantula the Rapper, out to piss people off! Now, the way I put things together, they’re very interconnected. I rarely write without music. I’m also writing with an audience in mind. I didn’t used to do that.

Because you didn’t have one yet?

No, that’s not why. I was antagonistic toward the world. I was 19. Some of that stuff I wrote when I was 17, 18. I’d be in my dorm room, listening to Aphex Twin and freaking out. Now, I have way more of an appreciation for the audience. Music should be a shared experience. It’s not just about me. When I listen to some of my old stuff, it sounds selfish. As you write music over a span of years, your philosophy changes based on your experiences. Maybe it’s from learning to DJ, or meeting more musicians and collaborating more, but now I feel music is meant to be shared. This is a way we can communicate without even understanding the words being said. It’s very powerful, very special. It’s one of the coolest things on earth. It made me want to do it justice.

Amid all the celebration of the Hip’s final show, there was also a backlash that claimed it was really kind of a last gasp from a certain kind of Canada, that this was a merely moment for “white Canada” and not the rest of the population. Did that resonate with you at all?

It did resonate with me. It crossed my mind. I saw it from both ways. Perception changes over time. The Tragically Hip, at one point in time, were a new band coming out of nowhere making these literate rock songs. They were not the establishment. But if you last long enough, you become the establishment figure. Last year, it was this shrine to the fading years of the white man, or something. I can see that, especially for people who are relatively new Canadians. They don’t get it at all; it doesn’t speak to them. I have this nostalgia for it. I feel it’s something you should experience, whether you know the music or not. I had a respect and appreciation for it, especially the bravery of the performance. I heard that he barely made it through some of these shows, physically. It’s hard for me to by cynical about it.

There’s this expectation of pop culture, that because it speaks to so many people that it must somehow speak to me. There is this illusion that any cultural thing will speak to everybody. This assumption that we all have to watch the SuperBowl: that’s the hive mind, “we have to like this.” There’s a sense of not wanting to be left out of the cultural conversation.

Here’s a reason why people felt the way you’re talking about. The Hip’s music didn’t exclude them. The band didn’t exclude them. The average person who appreciates the band, the person at the show wearing a Tragically Hip hockey jersey, those are the people who, in a way, exclude people of other races from that conversation and that experience. But you can’t help you your fans are. Your average Canucklehead driving a truck and rocking that jersey—which is, to me, one of the funniest merch objects there is, because it’s so not Tragically Hip—that’s who makes other people feel like it’s not something they need to be a part of. [Those other people] associate the people they see watching that show with the experiences they have with those people on a daily basis, where they are excluded—daily. You go into a Tim Hortons, and there is a certain segment of people who look at you a different way. Those people might be Hip fans, too.

Where did you watch the show?

Me and my girlfriend watched it on TV [in Toronto]. I have a friend back in Montreal, who is from New Brunswick, and he loves Canadiana. He’s the most Canadian guy I can think of. We were texting each other during the show. He was crying. My girlfriend was watching it just out of respect; she’s not a fan whatsoever. She doesn’t get down with any big public events; she doesn’t care. We had three different perspectives on the show. For him it was this defining moment. For her, she couldn’t give less of a shit. For me, I felt a kinship and a need to be a part of it, as a fellow songwriter. I had some tug of Canadianness, but I didn’t have a personal stake in how the show went. There was a wide cross-section of people who watched it for different reasons.

Speaking of final performances, what did you think of Phife Dawg on that last Tribe Called Quest album?

It’s a fresh record. It did him justice. It was a perfect send-off. It really brought him back in people’s minds. His solo stuff isn’t that good, and we hadn’t heard anything from him in a while. He had some cool flows and moments. It was really gratifying for a lot of rap fans.

I heard it took a lot out of him, physically, to finish the album. Same with Leonard Cohen, who made his entire last record while sitting in a chair in his house.

Look at what we call musical objects: records. What a perfect word to capture where you were at a particular time. Whether that’s your formative years when you’re spry and virile, or whether it’s your death knell. Music is such a reflection of life, and moments in time.