“They thought it sounded too Canadian,” he laughs, “So we suggested Road Apples instead, which they loved because they didn’t understand the reference.
Baker remembers how their American record label reacted. So, we crafted one part of a Canadian city onto an American one.” What rose to the top of the ballot from a bunch of possible titles was Saskadelphia. It seemed like the clubs were the same size, and you could be anywhere. “We were touring a lot, going from New York and Boston to Philadelphia and Saskatoon. “I remember seeing this Church of the Christadelphians and thought about how part of it could be crafted onto any other word,” he recalls. Johnny Fay comes up with a suggestion that, he believes, best defines the band’s place at the time. With no shortage of material, a trickier problem emerges: what do they leave behind on the studio floor? We had written a lot of songs and done a lot of touring over the preceding five years.”Īs the songs come, they are tinkered with and then evaluated for their worth, their positions sometimes ceded to other tracks that slowly bring an album called Road Apples (1991) to life. It was also an interesting time in music because a lot of diverse things were happening. We felt as if our career was taking off and we were firing on all cylinders creatively. “It seemed like an incredible follow-up to Memphi s and the first record. They have the jinx of a second album to disprove, and now have the resources to accomplish this. The musicians are all in their late twenties, flush with the success of a debut album that has gone Platinum and earned them a JUNO Award for Most Promising Group of The Year. Guided by producer Don Smith and engineer Bruce Barris, the sessions yield an avalanche of gritty rock ‘n’ roll with a relentless quality to it, like a stream of blues that struggles to be contained. If the young men from Kingston, Ontario, making music in what was once her home - singer Gord Downie, guitarists Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay - are troubled by this, they betray nothing. It is said that she fell and hit her head but continues to party on the premises. The Kingsway Studio, at the heart of this mansion where recording sessions are being held, comes with ceilings that are 14 feet high and the troubled spirit of an alcoholic woman who died in the 1800s. It is a place of ghosts, mostly friendly, that suddenly find themselves sharing space with a Canadian rock band trying to exorcise demons of its own. It is 1990 in New Orleans, in an old mansion that looms over the neighbourhood called Vieux Carré or the French Quarter. My task was to introduce their latest project called Saskadelphia and so, pinching myself, I put forth questions about recording sessions that had taken place three decades ago. As a result, a little over a month after the piece was published, I found myself in a virtual meeting with Rob Baker, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois, and Gord Sinclair. My perspective as an immigrant, on Canada’s lasting relationship with The Tragically Hip, somehow resonated with people. The only time there was any information about her personal life came through her breast cancer diagnosis in 2012.I responded to a tweet in January 2021, inviting writers to pitch their music stories to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). That’s why while writing this article, we struggle to find not only personal details about her but also Laura Leigh Usher’s pics on the internet. In an effort to live a normal life, Laura Leigh Usher insisted that she kept herself and her kids away from the limelight of the rock world. He even discussed the responsibility of being a father and said his career and job as a father were both harder than it looks. Their father also wanted to make a point to say that they could take what they needed from him and leave what they didn’t. What we do know is that the Tragically Hip frontman talked about wanting his kids to be good, to be safe and have a great, long life. Though Gord Downie and Laura Leigh Usher’s kids were often discussed by the musician during interviews, the actual details of their names or age are scarce. They were good at it as we have no information on when they got married or when they separated, just that it happened before his diagnosis. The musician and his wife worked very efficiently at keeping attention away from their personal lives.
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