It was Canada Day, 1992, Canada’s 125th birthday, three months before the release of the Tragically Hip’s third studio album, Fully Completely. Gord Downie was sweating under the weight of a thick khaki shirt, hair plastered to his forehead, breathing heavily into his microphone. Thousands of people had turned up to a field next to the Molson Brewery in Barrie, about an hour north of Toronto, for the first of two shows the Tragically Hip would headline in one day on opposite sides of the country. The young crowd was half-drunk and baking in the midsummer sun, and Maple Leaf Flags billowed lazily in Downie’s eyeline.

“Welcome to Molsonia! I’ve decided to change the name,” Downie said. He was trying to bait the crowd, but nobody was catching on. “Happy Stupid Day,” he added, a more manic edge creeping into his voice. The people he was trying to insult were cheering his every word; a few beers deep, they loved the idea of Stupid Day. He jammed another maggot onto the hook and hurled it back into the water: “We could have our own motto: ‘Who are we kidding?’” On the live MuchMusic broadcast beaming this out from coast to coast, a young girl perched on her friend’s shoulders stared back at the stage blankly.

Three albums in, Canada’s love affair with the Tragically Hip was already a complicated relationship.

Canada’s obsession with the Tragically Hip is unique in the English-speaking world. A recent four-part Amazon Prime documentary, No Dress Rehearsal, proposed that the Hip were to Canada as U2 were to Ireland or the Beatles were to Britain, but that’s not quite right. Everyone had U2 and the Beatles, regardless of where they were born or brought up. Only Canada truly loved the Tragically Hip. They sold over six million records in Canada alone—that’s one album for every six people in the country. All but four of the 13 albums they released went straight to the top of the Canadian album charts, and one of those that didn’t—their debut, Up to Here—ended up selling well over a million copies in Canada over the next decade. They were national icons unlike any other group or artist previously, the symbol of a country in the shadow of an economic and cultural superpower.

Formed in Kingston, Ontario, a university city on Lake Ontario, in 1984, the Tragically Hip struck a balance between plaid-shirted everyman relatability and shamanic rockstar mystique. Greg Barr of the Ottawa Citizen wrote in 1991 that the Hip’s connection with their audience was based in part on them looking like their fans. They were all people who “have this thing for raunchy music and watching hockey on Saturday night… guys with regular jobs or college students who do their own laundry too.” That may have been true of guitarists Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay, but Downie was, at least on stage, a different animal.

Critics at the time often compared him to one of his heroes, Jim Morrison, but there were myriad other descriptions that, taken together, paint the picture of a madman. A composite image generated from Canadian newspaper clippings of the time would show Jack Nicholson in The Shining singing with a “12 cup-of-coffee” intensity, a man who seemed “possessed by the kind of devils who were supposed to have created rock music in the first place” and was “reminiscent of the devil child Anthony, who could turn people into mutants just by staring at them, in a scary old Twilight Zone episode.” Downie was a magnetic presence on stage, dramatic and irrepressible, often devolving into stream-of-consciousness rants and dragging four-minute songs out into 10-minute jams.

Their first two full-lengths, 1989’s Up to Here and 1991’s Road Apples, had been recorded in Memphis and New Orleans, respectively, and a damp Southern air seeped into their sound. The guitars crunched, Downie’s lyrics hinted at a collective outsiderdom—“Hey north, you’re south/Shut your big mouth,” he sang through a humid drawl on “New Orleans Is Sinking”—and lines could be traced from his disjointed poetry back to Kingston. But his theatrics and cadence owed more to Morrison than any Canadian icon. Baker and Langlois borrowed consciously from blues and Southern rock, often dousing their guitar sounds in motor oil-thick distortion. It’s not that the Hip were pretending to be American; kids on college campuses in Canada could recognize the real-life Ontario jailbreak behind Up to Here’s “38 Years Later,” or the crisis in Quebec that animated Road Apples’ “Born in the Water.” But the Hip were a blues-rock band from Canada. This was not Canada’s answer to Bruce Springsteen.

Their die-hard following at home was built on different foundations. First, Canada is an enormous place—the world’s second biggest land mass, pockmarked by mountains and endless rolling plains. Driving from town to town basically takes forever. So most bands simply don’t. Smaller acts might stick to their hometowns and immediate surroundings, while major artists hit major cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, perhaps a couple of others with NHL teams and airports in between. The Hip hit small towns and out-of-the-way pockets, driving through the night or taking ferries where necessary to make it where others wouldn’t dare.

Crucially, while the Tragically Hip were connecting the dots on the map, their music was beamed from coast to coast in a way that few but the biggest American bands would dream of at home. Canadian Content regulations (usually shortened to CanCon) had first been implemented by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 1971, as a direct and centralized effort to protect Canadian cultural identity despite the enormous appeal of music from the U.S. and UK. The law required 30% of music played on AM radio to be identifiably Canadian, and it prompted a backlash from radio programmers at first, who insisted they would be forced to spin inferior records.

But by the mid-’80s, when video music stations like MuchMusic took off parallel with MTV in the States, Canadian artists were more visible than ever. CanCon effectively created its own ecosystem, in which young artists heard and saw Canadian music, made music of their own, and knew it would have a good chance of making it onto the radio. In 1991, the year before that show in Molsonia, FM radio’s CanCon quotas were raised to line up with the AM. Three out of every 10 songs on the Canadian airwaves were Canadian. And an increasing number of those were made by the Tragically Hip.

CanCon also gave Canadian bands a degree of breathing room. Though the Hip toured America and played clubs with the same relentlessness as they did in Canada, Road Apples and Up to Here had done little commercially in the United States. That would have put most artists under immense pressure to succeed on a third album. But the Hip had the high floor of Canadian success. Not only did they not feel pressure to engineer their songs for radio play, they could even experiment and expand their sound with the knowledge that they’d be played by the CBC either way.

Not that the band didn’t want success elsewhere. “We were still holding out for the equivalent American success,” Sinclair told Michael Barclay, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider in Have Not Been the Same: The Can-Rock Renaissance 1985–1995. Their label, MCA, was convinced the breakthrough was imminent as well. At their behest, Chris Tsangarides, better known for his work in mainstream metal and hard rock, was drafted to produce their album and generate a punchier, more radio-friendly sound. It worked. Where their first two albums retained the jagged edges of their live show, Fully Completely was tighter, slicker, and more dynamic.

Above all, Downie’s lyrics had changed. They were weird, a disorienting journey through Canadian history—real and imagined—that led somewhere chaotic and disquieting. Fully Completely’s first song was dedicated to Hugh MacLennan and borrowed lyrics from his novel The Watch That Ends the Night—heralded as a classic in Canada but little known elsewhere. “At the Hundredth Meridian” placed itself on the literal dividing line between Western Canada and the Atlantic and Central regions, asking awkward and rhetorical questions: “Me debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?” This was all within the first eight minutes. It was, Kirk Makin wrote at the Globe & Mail, “swirling, quavery, complex, challenging and so profoundly Canadian.”

Everywhere on Fully Completely, Downie seemed intent on confronting Canada’s foundational myths. “Fifty-Mission Cap” is structurally and musically one of the Tragically Hip’s most straightforward songs, a 4/4 rock track that opens up into a two-chord chorus. It’s the sort of thing that would (and did) play as well at a bowling alley as a packed-out basketball arena. But Downie’s lyrics are peculiar: “Bill Barilko disappeared/That summer/He was on a fishing trip.” It is on its face a curious slice of niche Canadiana, mysterious and mostly forgotten: Bill Barilko, the Cup-winning defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, who vanished into the untamed Ontario nowhere.

Downie had become obsessed with the story, spending evenings in the library researching it. “There was one night, it was close to closing time and I was right up to the point where they were about to discover his body,” he told the Toronto Star. “It was dark and in my mind I was in a bush plane somewhere over Northern Ontario. A librarian tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped right out of my skin.” He interviewed his bandmates’ fathers, who told him about the conspiracy theories around Barilko—some thought he had been a Soviet spy, others that he was embroiled in a gold scandal and had been busted by the RCMP. Those were only put to bed when his body was discovered, 11 years later, in 1962, the same year the Leafs won their next Stanley Cup.

The chorus is even more complicated. Downie sings that he “stole” the story “from a hockey card/I keep tucked up under/My fifty-mission cap.” The fifty-mission cap itself was a staple of the elite Allied bomber squadrons during the Second World War. Pilots would remove the stiffening inner ring from their service cap to make wearing a headset in the cockpit more comfortable. Over time, the cap would sag and wear down, accumulating more sweat and dirt after every raid. If surviving even a handful of missions over the skies of Europe was unlikely, living through 50 was a sign of immense courage, impeccable skill, divine provenance, or a combination of all three. A fifty-mission cap told that story.

Unless, of course, you faked it. In the chorus, Downie admits that it isn’t really a fifty-mission cap in his hands, with Barilko’s hockey card tucked into the lining. “I worked it in to look like that,” he sings, as though it’s a baseball glove or too-clean pair of jeans. In an interview with Steve Newton around the release of Fully Completely, Downie was clearly charmed by the idea. “Of course, you’d work it in to look like a fifty-mission cap so as to appear that you had more experience than you really did,” he said.

Maybe Downie was just drawing a parallel between the inexperienced Henry Hudson, who piloted the ill-fated flight that went down with Barilko, and the neophyte pilots of the Allied Air Forces. But it’s difficult to ignore the imperfections in this image of elite military pilots, these dashing and supposedly unquestionable heroes. Some of them were just kids. Some of them weren’t heroes at all—at least not yet. They were working it in. And if that image of Canadian history could be complicated so quickly, as a chaser to a story about a vanished hockey player, everything was questionable.

Elsewhere the lyrics were more directly adversarial. “Wheat Kings” was torn straight from the headlines, an acoustic track about David Milgaard, a 17-year-old wrongly convicted of a brutal rape and murder in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Milgaard served 23 years in prison before being released earlier that summer of 1992, and eventually fully exonerated. The song begins in a watercolor image of rural Canada, Downie singing of “sundown in the Paris of the Prairies,” but the veil is quickly pulled back to reveal the nightmare in Milgaard’s mind, “where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister/Hung with pictures of our parents’ prime ministers.” Five of them had served in the time it took Milgaard to be convicted, suffer behind bars, and find freedom.

Most urgent of all was “Looking for a Place to Happen,” which told the bloody and bitter story of European annexation of Native land from two perspectives. First, Downie gave voice to French explorer Jacques Cartier, who callously wanted “To find a place, an ancient race/The kind you’d like to gamble with,” before shifting the focus to an indigenous person fleeing for their life: “I’ll paint a scene, from memory/So I’d know who murdered me.” The Hip were not telling the story of a harmonious country. Everywhere on Fully Completely, there seemed to be injustice and death, a beautiful-seeming facade melting away to reveal something grotesque and disturbing.

Fully Completely exploded upon release in Canada, selling 200,000 copies in its five weeks. In the States, it performed so poorly that MCA pulled their marketing budget for it just a fortnight after its release. “Two weeks before the record comes out, all the record company is saying is, ‘It’s gonna be big boys, look out!’ Then the week after, no one returns our calls,” Sinclair said. “That’s the way it is.”

By July 1993, the band’s own optimism had curdled. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, drummer Gord Sinclair put it down to an attitude south of the border. “I think Americans have this weird thing about Canada,” he said. “They look north and figure it’s just the 52nd state. Being from Canada really does not have much of an impact for them. They just sort of assume that you’re a second-class American or American with a funny accent or French.”

Through the nineties, that divide grew. By 1996, seemingly every interviewer prodded Downie about their commercial success in Canada and relative anonymity in the States. It annoyed him. Maybe America was the “big leagues,” he admitted in an interview with Newton at Vancouver’s Georgia Straight. But they were a successful band by any metric. “Ultimately, if you want to take our success in Canada and exponentially translate it to America, you’re talking about us being Guns N’ Roses. Or Counting Crows. Ultimately it’s just something that I don’t think could ever happen to this band, and never really thought it could. And sometimes the thing I fear, in that context, more than American failure, is American success.”

The more that America ignored the Hip, the more they were lionized at home. Shortly before they embarked on their final tour, in 2016, Dave Kaufman of the National Post wrote that the Hip had “become a part of our landscape, an experience in what it means to be Canadian.” They embodied “gravel parking lots and behind-the-hockey-rink smoke-ups… old theatres in the pines and college students having arguments that don’t really matter… waiting in line at Tim Hortons and going to the cottage on a long weekend.”

But even on Fully Completely, the album most laden with references to their homeland, the Tragically Hip didn’t get around to singing about illicit joints, campus debates, or waiting for mediocre coffee. They did once reference driving to and from a home in cottage country, the affluent part of the countryside full of idyllic second homes. But that song, “Bobcaygeon,” from 1999’s Phantom Power, was a poetic reflection on fascism from the perspective of a disillusioned police officer. It namechecked a British anarchist folk-punk group and nodded to real-life race riots in prewar London and Toronto’s West End. It wasn’t just an ode to cracking a cold one on a Sunday night, though today you’ll still find long-weekenders drinking hard seltzer and listening to Downie sing that “their voices rang with that Aryan twang.”

Kaufman isn’t alone in loading the band up with his own national baggage. The Tragically Hip’s status as “Canada’s Band” has oversimplified their entire existence, flattening them into some kind of nationalistic sing-along outfit, draped constantly in the Maple Leaf, swigging from a can of Molson Canadian, cheering on the local hockey team. (Downie was, for what it’s worth, a lifelong fan of the Boston Bruins.) Many people heard the names of their hometowns—places deemed desperately uncool in contrast with small-town America—in Hip songs and felt a natural pang of recognition. The critic and theorist Northrop Frye wrote that “Canadian sensibility is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” Downie’s lyrics seemed to exist inside that riddle, briefly fixing the songs in place: here is the Hundredth Meridian, here is Maple Leaf Gardens, here is a nightmare of a bleak museum after dark.

Shortly after Downie died in 2017, University of Alberta musicologist Alexander Carpenter led a semiotic-psychoanalytic study of the Hip’s lyrics and concluded that they had become a sort of “fetish object.” There are no neat answers in Hip songs about what it means to be Canadian, no unambiguous stories about the Canadian everyman, or folk tales that link the band to some deep history. The place names and even literal coordinates in their songs invite listeners to draw such connections, but rummage around in the songs themselves, and things are more cryptic. “The Hip, standing in for Canadian identity, give rise to a desire for identity, and then in a circular fashion come to represent identity, but never in a way that is clear or pin-down-able,” Alexander said. In his eulogy for the band on that final tour, Dave Bidini expressed the same idea more poignantly: “Canada is good when it’s viewed and heard through the Tragically Hip, and the Tragically Hip is good when they’re viewed and heard through us.”

Five years after the Canada Day show in Molsonia, the band was interviewed by its fans for a piece that’s since been excerpted by the CBC. Downie was asked by one fan about why he spoke so “bitterly” that day. He explained that alcohol and nationalism were a dangerous mix, and that he felt other bands on the bill had been treated poorly by a boorish crowd. “Ultimately,” he said, “I believe everything would have been way better if we’d done the whole thing on July 2nd—we could have celebrated the Canada of the self and not the Canada that is sold to us.”

Today, Canada finds itself unexpectedly drawn back into these questions of national identity in the shadow of its superpower neighbor. The President of the United States wants to annex his northern neighbor, which has put Canada in the awkward position of having to justify its own existence. This has had mixed results. In January, for example, shortly after the first mention of annexation, outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could only define Canada by what it was not. “Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN. “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, we are not American.” A more rigorous defence of Canadian identity and statehood remains a work in progress, which is perhaps forgivable. It is a difficult thing to reckon with in a hurry, and even more difficult to address in soundbites.

Downie’s refusal to engage in those sorts of platitudes is what set him apart as an icon in Canadian culture. On May 24, 2016, the Tragically Hip announced that their lead singer had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and that their upcoming tour would be their last. The Man Machine Poem tour took the band back across Canada one last time, for 15 shows in 10 cities.

He was sick, often tired, his mental fog constantly lifting and descending. But as well as touring, Downie used his platform in his final months to advocate for reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations—picking up where the stark “Looking for a Place to Happen” had left off. The last solo album he released in his lifetime, Secret Path, accompanied by a graphic novel of the same name, was a concept album centered on the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe who died in 1966 trying to escape from one of Canada’s many brutal and deadly residential schools. “To become a country, and truly call ourselves Canada, it means we must become one,” he said at a ceremony hosted by the Assembly of First Nations in his honor. “We must walk down a path of reconciliation from now on. Together, and forever.”

Fully Completely is an extension of that spirit. It remains cryptic and contradictory, a Canada written in riddles and red herrings, as indecipherable and unknowable as the country itself. It confuses and complicates the country’s underlying stories, confronts the grisly past and unjust present in the stubborn hope that there might be a better future. It’s a sonic attack on Molsonia, the sound of a Canada of the self.