FULLY & COMPLETELY: REDUX
"In Violet Light" - The Tragically Hip
Episode Show Notes
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Fully & Completely: Redux | "In Violet Light" - The Tragically Hip (2002)
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Hey, it's jD here.
Some albums don't just meet you where you are - they find you exactly when you need them. **"In Violet Light" is that record.** Released in June 2002, it's the one that pulled jD hard back into The Tragically Hip after a stretch of distance. And if you listen closely, it makes total sense why. This isn't a band trying to hold on - it's a band that has let go of every obligation and is just making music for themselves. **The result is one of the most quietly assured records of The Hip's entire career.**
This week on Fully & Completely: redux, jD and Greg LeGros go track by track through "In Violet Light" - the eighth studio album from The Tragically Hip, recorded in the Bahamas with legendary producer Hugh Padham - and make the case that this record has no business being this good, this far into a career.
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EPISODE OVERVIEW
"In Violet Light" landed in a 2002 music landscape that included Coldplay's "A Rush of Blood to the Head," Queens of the Stone Age's "Songs for the Deaf," Beck's "Sea Change," and Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot It in People." The indie pop explosion was just beginning to blow the roof off Canadian music. The Hip were eight albums deep, the mainstream had largely written them off, and **they responded by making one of their best records.** No fat. No filler. Eleven tracks of lean, confident, beautiful rock and roll.
The album was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas - the same studio where AC/DC recorded "Back in Black" and Bob Marley cut some of his most enduring work - with Hugh Padham, the producer behind the gated drum sound that defined the 1980s (Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," Sting's solo catalogue, The Police's "Synchronicity"). **jD and Greg break down why that combination - this band, this producer, this place - produced something genuinely special.**
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TRACK BY TRACK HIGHLIGHTS
**'Are You Ready to Love'** - The opener sets the whole album's thesis. jD hears the first verse as a direct response to the critics and mainstream fans who had written The Hip off. **"They're pulling the plug. They've got our whole dug." And then - the chorus arrives like a shrug and a fist at the same time: are you ready for love?** A great rock and roll song that doubles as a mission statement.
**'Use It Up'** - Built on a lyric attributed to the booklet of a Raymond Carver collection, this is a track about seizing everything, wasting nothing, and making music for the love of it. Greg hears Radiohead's "OK Computer" in the verses and the Georgia Satellites in the chorus - **and somehow The Tragically Hip pull both of those things off in the same song.** A slow burn that rewards headphones.
**'The Darkest One'** - jD turns up whatever he's listening to every single time this song starts. **"The wild are strong and the strong are the darkest ones - and you're the darkest one."** Greg calls it a safe place. A song about freedom of expression, comfort, and the strange intimacy of being fully understood. Don't let the Trailer Park Boys video fool you - this song could have broken them wide open.
**'It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken'** - The centrepiece. The lead single. **Both jD and Greg pick this as their track of the record - the first time in the history of Fully & Completely that hosts have landed on the same song.** Named for a Canadian graphic novel by Seth and a phrase used by band staffer Molly Lorimer to describe life on the road, it's a song about mortality, aging, and the strange grace that comes when you stop fighting. Death is swirling all around it - and it's still one of the most uplifting things The Tragically Hip ever made.
**'Silver Jet'** - The one that changes gears just right. Greg connects this song personally to the empty skies over the Danforth in the days after 9/11, and the feeling of the first plane cutting back through the silence. **A song about hope, fear, and the things that pull your gaze forward.** The wolves of Northumberland. An archipelago. A green star. Only Gord.
**'Throwing Off Glass'** - Companion piece to 'Trick Rider' from "Phantom Power" - if that song is about his son, this one is about his daughter. A slow builder that rewards patience. **A soundscape that would fit comfortably on "Coke Machine Glow."**
**'All Tore Up'** - A great drinking rock and roll song. Dottie the bluegrass singer. Open concept. Getting a little happening with old friends. **No one else writes a lyric like this and makes it fit inside a song this well.** Turn it up.
**'Leave'** - A waltz in 3/4 time. Beautiful backup vocals. A late-night phone call at three in the morning. **"You better be dying." And they were.** An emotional gut-punch that doubles as a permission slip - to leave a job, a relationship, a place that no longer fits.
**'The Dire Wolf'** - A pseudo-history lesson disguised as a rock song. Tallulah Bankhead and Canada Lee, stars of Hitchcock's "The Lifeboat." Ann Harvey of Isle of Morts, Newfoundland, who rescued 163 shipwrecked souls in 1828. A poem called "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" by Wallace Stevens. **Greg pulls all of this from memory. It's an entire university lecture wrapped in six minutes of music that absolutely slaps.**
**'The Dark Canuck'** - The closer. Possibly the longest Tragically Hip song ever recorded at six and a half minutes. A time signature change halfway through. **Canadian soldiers as peacekeepers. Apple, Zippo, and Metronome as record labels. Jaws at the drive-in. The Dark Canuck playing second on the double bill.** Nobody at the drive-in is staying for it. And that's sort of the whole point.
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WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS
This is the album that brought jD back to The Hip in earnest - **the record that cracked open the second half of his relationship with this band.** It's also the episode where he and Greg pick the same song for the first time. And it's the one where jD, partway through discussing 'Leave,' pauses to talk about his mother. **Listen for that moment. It's what this podcast is for.**
"In Violet Light" is a masterpiece with no business being this good eight albums in. And this episode earns every minute of its runtime.
So there's that.
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SOURCES & CREDITS
• HipMuseum.com
• This Is Our Life: The Tragically Hip in the 1990s (Michael Barclay)
• "It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken" - graphic novel by Seth
• "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" - poem by Wallace Stevens
• Ann Harvey of Isle of Morts, Newfoundland - historical record
• Compass Point Studios, Nassau, Bahamas - production history
• Raymond Carver - attributed quote in "Use It Up"
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The Tragically Hip Podcast Series - Est. 2018
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