A lyric from “Christmastime in Toronto,” from his 2003 solo album Battle of the Nudes: “With your dark epiphanies/Your true lines of smoke/Your glistening rails and streetcars all aglow/Always the wind and the persistent snow/Gets into your eyes and your mouth and every fold of your coat.” At least half of that line is from Chekhov, and the other half is a mundane image of winter in Toronto ascending into a realm of magic realism. He takes literature, history, and geography, and compresses them into living, shapeshifting jigsaw puzzles. His work is rarely about himself, and in fact seems to flow from a composite perspective, a sensibility that shifts so often that it resists characterization or stability. Unlike fellow Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, he is not particularly interested in space, and unlike fellow Canadian lyricist Joni Mitchell, his songs aren’t delivered by or assembled around characters. Downie, as a lyricist, is traditionally remarkable for his density. This is the most severe and spartan context that Downie’s sang in since his solo debut, 2001’s Coke Machine Glow, and his words for the most part land in the scenery as haunted, disconnected fragments. Piano chords drone and occasionally sound as if they’d been reduced to their own echo, wrapping the songs in a kind of musical shadow. (This quality might’ve been transferred to the recordings by Drew, whose albums with Broken Social Scene have such a strongly defined sense of place that listening to them feels like visiting individual cities.) The instruments, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, are recorded in such a way that they produce atmospheres out of minimal playing. The compositions on Secret Path feel more like haunted environments than songs it sounds as if Downie, Drew, and the Stills’ Dave Hamelin-all of whom supply most of the instrumentation-are all wandering through these spaces with Chanie. A recent commission estimated that up to 6,000 children may have died while living in residential schools, and earlier this year a state of emergency was declared in the indigenous community of Attawapiskat after 11 people attempted suicide on the same day one of the cited reasons for the suicide attempts is the lingering, cross-generational trauma of residential schools.ĭownie tells Chanie’s particular version of this story by developing its sense of place. The Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of children in residential schools in 1920, and many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. The students suffered physical and sexual abuse many died from disease, which spread recklessly through the schools. The schools were developed to “take the Indian out of the child” teachers forbid the students from speaking or writing in their native language and educated them exclusively in white culture and Christianity. The first residential schools appeared in Canada in the late 1800s, and the system survived until the mid-1990s children were removed from their families and placed in distant boarding schools administered by local churches and funded by the federal government. The album that Drew and Downie made, Secret Path, is, in Downie’s words, “an attempt to capture the feeling, somehow, of trying to get home.” One day he escaped the school and tried to walk home. His name was warped into the misnomer “Charlie” by his teachers. “Charlie” is Chanie Wenjack, a boy who, in the 1960s, was separated from his family and placed in the Cecelia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario.

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