Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005

By Michael Barclay

An authoritative, unprecedented account of how in the early 2000s Canadian music finally became cool

Hearts on Fire is about the creative explosion in Canadian music of the early 2000s, which captured the world’s attention in entirely new ways. The Canadian wave didn’t just sweep over one genre or one city, it stretched from coast to coast, affecting large bands and solo performers, rock bands and DJs, and it connected to international scenes by capitalizing on new technology and old-school DIY methods.

Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Feist, Tegan and Sara, Alexisonfire: those were just the tip of the iceberg. This is also the story of hippie chicks, turntablists, poetic punks, absurdist pranksters, queer orchestras, obtuse wordsmiths, electronic psychedelic jazz, power-pop supergroups, sexually bold electro queens, cowboys who used to play speed metal, garage rock evangelists, classically trained solo violinists, and the hip-hop scene that preceded Drake. This is Canada like it had never sounded before. This is the Canada that soundtracked the dawn of a new century.

Featuring more than 100 exclusive interviews and two decades of research, Hearts on Fire is the music book every Canadian music fan will want on their shelf.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781773059044

Book preview

Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005 by Michael Barclay.

Hearts on Fire

Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005

Michael Barclay

Logo: ECW Press.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction: Get In or Get Out

Chapter 1: Visualize Success

Chapter 2: National Hum

Discovery channels

Let’s not party like it’s 1999

Shaking the stigma

The big bang

Bay of funding

Cheap thrills

Digital witnesses

You can only drive down Main Street so many times

The mouse that roared

Firestarter

Lean on your peers

Chapter 3: Dead Flag Blues

Chapter 4: Don’t Be Crushed

Chapter 5: Second Acts and’90s Survivors

Chapter 6: From Blown Speakers

Chapter 7: First We Take Berlin

Chapter 8: Don’t Mess with Our Love

Chapter 9: Now More Than Ever

Chapter 10: Country in the City

Chapter 11: Your Ex-Lover Is in the Band

Chapter 12: Ain’t Nobody Can Hang with Us

Chapter 13: Must You Always Remind Me?

Chapter 14: Baiting the Public

Chapter 15: Weirdo Magnets

Chapter 16: Drunk Clowns of the Victorian Era

Chapter 17: Crown of Love

Conclusion: We Built Another World

Acknowledgements

Selected Sources

Interviews

Frequently cited sources

Photos

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

For Helen and Leonard

Introduction

Get In or Get Out

This book was originally going to be about the entire first decade of the new century. Ten is a nice round number. This book’s predecessor, Have Not Been the Same, covered a decade. But this time I soon realized I had way too much to talk about, and most of the really important moments happened in the first half of a decade; the six following years were a continuation, not as transformative.

Part of the central thesis here is that the years 2000 to 2005 are when the rest of the world actually gave a shit about Canadian music: not just our somewhat random chart-toppers, but the groundswell of creativity that was happening en masse at the time, in many genres of music, using many different metrics of success. Evolving technology and media helped facilitate this in ways old models could not.

I grew up in alternative culture and have a degree in Canadian history. Therefore I’ve always thought external validation is nice but by no means necessary: if the music made around the corner moves you, it is therefore important—whether or not the rest of the country or the rest of the world hears it. It’s a tired truism that Canadian media often ignores its artists until they get covered in the U.S. or U.K. It’s been true for as long as Canada has been a country. Every arts writer has used that hook to pitch stories to reluctant Canadian editors, shaming them into playing catch-up. We rarely celebrate our own until someone else celebrates them first. That’s a national embarrassment.

And yet this book is primarily about those who broke through borders. In another era, that would just mean the superstars—you know who they are. This time period, however, was when weirdos and innovators were more likely to break internationally than anyone aiming for commercial radio.

Applying an international filter to my thesis was one easy way to further narrow my focus—and frankly, people outside Canada might now actually read this book. That meant excluding many of my favourite artists, some of my friends and likely many of yours, too. But you’re holding this book right now: Can you imagine it being longer? Me neither. I’m well aware who’s missing from this book; I’m sure I’ll be hearing about it. Don’t assume it’s because I’m not a fan: sometimes that’s true; often it isn’t. Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you the reasons—and give you a list of 50 other great Canadian records from this time period that aren’t found in these pages.

Every review of this book will quibble about who’s in and who’s out. Every musician who put out records during this time period is going to jump to the index.1 to see how many times they’re mentioned, if they are at all. Readers across the country will complain it has too much Toronto. Readers in Toronto will complain there’s not enough. Residents of every province and every metropolis will feel underrepresented. That’s the story of Canadian history. Because Canada is not a thing. Any attempt to represent Canada will be an abject failure. That’s the story of this book as well.

There are so many stories about this period of time, inside and outside these pages, that could be spun into books of their own. I want to read them. I encourage you to write them—and to take this book for what it is, not what it isn’t.

Now, dive in. These are deep waters.

1 Spoiler: there isn’t one, so download your free e-book that comes with your purchase, and do your own search.

Chapter 1

Visualize Success

That Night in Toronto

This book began on December 14, 2001. Toronto was blanketed in the first heavy snowfall of the year: the warm, insulating kind that makes the city look beautiful, the kind that makes the coming winter feel welcome. The band Royal City was headlining Lee’s Palace for the first time, to launch their second album, Alone at the Microphone, on Three Gut Records. Also on the bill was a brand new act called the Hidden Cameras, an unruly orchestra that looked like a group of queer camp counsellors, with underwear-clad go-go dancers, playing perfect ’50s-style pop melodies set to four-on-the-floor disco thumps and violins.1

It was one of the most beautiful nights of music I’d ever seen in my life. The Hidden Cameras were a complete surprise; though I had a few friends in the band, that was my virgin experience. Royal City was not a surprise. I’d played on a solo record by bandleader Aaron Riches, who in turn had played drums in my band when we needed a fill-in. Royal City drummer Nathan Lawr was a former roommate. That week I’d given Alone at the Microphone a five-star review in Eye Weekly. Nepotism? Sure. But if I hadn’t written that review, someone else would have: the album was a critical favourite across the country that year and still gets mentioned as a classic of the era. It was on an entirely different level from other records that happened to be made by friends in my musical orbit.

It eventually got Royal City a record deal with the U.K.’s Rough Trade Records, with the man who’d signed both the Smiths and, more recently, the Strokes; the label signed the Hidden Cameras at the same time. The idea of either signing seemed ridiculous on that cold December night.

When the show was over, I lingered at the bar. I ran into Stuart Berman, my editor at Eye Weekly, and we shared our rave reactions. Mark my words, he said. This is the start of something. In a couple of years, everyone will be talking about Toronto.

I was highly skeptical. Two months earlier, in the same venue, had been the launch party for a book I co-wrote, Have Not Been the Same. That book was about Canadian music between 1985 and ’95 that was beloved at home but, with some notable exceptions, barely registered anywhere else. Tales of Canuck underachievement had been hammered into me to the point that I believed, just like one of my favourite (non-Canadian) songs of 2001 said, Mediocrity rules, man.

I don’t want to burst your bubble, I told Berman, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about Canada, no matter how good our music is. People care more about indie music from New Zealand or Iceland than they ever will about Canada. Canada will never be cool.

In 2001, I believed the Nickelbacks of the world would likely be our greatest export, not the Royal Cities. Not the Hidden Cameras. Not the Feists. Not any other genre of music, either, especially not our hip-hop.

That night, Royal City covered Iggy Pop’s Success. I should have listened. I should have known. Another Three Gut act had already warned me.

---

Nine months earlier, I first heard the Constantines. I was living in Guelph and had just finished co-writing Have Not Been the Same; I’d barely left the house in a year. The week before, Berman had written about them with the most hyperbolic prose I’d ever read. Before I knew it, my friends at Three Gut Records had signed them. It turned out that one of the greatest new Canadian bands was living literally around the corner from me, 100 metres away, and I’d been too suffocated by history to even notice.

That weekend I went to see them play. The show was in a bright grad lounge on the fifth floor of Guelph’s University Centre, a building akin to a shopping mall with office space. It was the most unappealing venue possible, a benefit show for some loosely knit campus club of some kind, which meant that most people were there to talk disinterestedly to colleagues and chain-smoke. (You could still do that indoors then.)

None of that mattered to the four blue-jeaned boys who plugged into their amps on the ersatz stage. By the end of their first song, every ear in the room was fixated on the ferocious sound coming from the corner. In no time, singer/guitarist Bry Webb was climbing his large Marshall stack, perhaps because it seemed the correct move to make over such a gigantic sound, or maybe he just felt liberated playing somewhere that wasn’t a basement with a five-foot ceiling. Bassist Dallas Wehrle closed his eyes meditatively, his left fist raised in a rock’n’roll salute while his right hand plucked pulsing open strings. Guitarist Steve Lambke stood relatively in place, legs apart, his occasional barked hardcore vocals the antithesis of his quiet, offstage speech. Drummer Doug MacGregor commanded the beat with a rare balance of force, precision and grace.

Interviewing them in their living room a week later for Exclaim!, their landline kept ringing with requests to speak to a Constantine. In the background, Webb had put on a very early album by fellow rock’n’roll believer Springsteen; Rosalita competed with our conversation. All four were humble and polite and, with the exception of the gregarious MacGregor, soft-spoken. Their normalcy was surprising. Not because I’d expected the Constantines to be arrogant hipsters, necessarily. But for performers known to dangle from ceilings and strip down to their underwear, screaming for the death of rock’n’roll while simultaneously tapping into everything glorious about the art form—well, you’d expect them to have bigger heads than four nice small-town men who grew up playing in hardcore bands.

That first show I saw shouldn’t be totally glamorized. The performance was far from perfect. They stammered awkwardly between songs, stalling any momentum. Webb’s raspy voice was inaudible, with only faint traces of poetry distinguishable in the din. The rubbery rhythm section tied everything together, as the Sleater-Kinney-esque guitar interplay between Webb and Lambke was often lost underneath sheets of distortion and volume. And while they suggested transcendence, they didn’t yet deliver.

Soon, of course, they would. Night after night, howling at the moon. In the next few years, I saw them everywhere short of a stadium: rock clubs, folk festivals, outdoor university frosh gigs, farmers’ fields, 150-year-old hotels, the CBC studios, in New York City, and in their Guelph basement.

And Stuart Berman was right: the rest of the world did care. Peaches was already becoming one of the most influential musicians in pop, and non-Torontonian acts as musically diverse as Godspeed, Kid Koala, the New Pornographers, the Weakerthans and the Be Good Tanyas had been getting international attention for the past two years. The Constantines signed to Sub Pop after a set at South by Southwest in March 2002.

---

Less than a year later, Berman was right again: in October 2002 he wrote a five-star review of You Forgot It in People, made by friends of his, Broken Social Scene. His review openly fessed up to the nepotism, negated immediately by the perfect or near-perfect scores that record got from Berman’s peers in Toronto and far beyond.

You Forgot It in People was released four months before I moved to Montreal to work at CBC Radio’s Brave New Waves. On December 1, I was there to scout out apartments, and Broken Social Scene, with Leslie Feist in tow, happened to be playing La Sala Rossa. Royal City was the opening act. I had dinner with them across the street at Casa del Popolo, where we ran into Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew. I’d met him once before: two years ago, on a Toronto patio where he was eagerly eavesdropping on the Have Not Been the Same co-authors discussing our work-in-progress. I liked him immediately, and not just because he was a schmoozer who courted critics. That night in Montreal, he good-naturedly needled me on the chances that You Forgot It in People would make Exclaim!’s year-end list.2

That night I met Tim Kingsbury, with whom I had many mutual friends from Guelph, including the members of Royal City. Tim had just joined the band first on the bill that night. That band was called Arcade Fire.

I can’t lie: I missed Arcade Fire’s set to hang out with an old friend across town. When I arrived at the venue, everyone was raving about Tim’s band. A lovely and engaging woman with wild curls and lace gloves was working the merch table, peddling a two-song cassette tape that came in a standard letter envelope, on the front of which was written in marker: With ❤ from Arcade Fire. Her name was Régine. I bought the cassette for two dollars. I brought it back to Guelph and played it every week on my campus radio show. In the next two years, I made sure I didn’t miss a single Arcade Fire show. I became an evangelist.

I also got to know them. We shared dinners, soccer games, random adventures. I was at the EP release show at Casa del Popolo where they broke up on stage. I saw them regroup in several incarnations. I repeatedly saw rooms full of people fall in love with them: at their first show in Toronto, in Hamilton, in Chapel Hill, in New York City.

When they were working on Funeral, they became socially scarce, all holding down shitty jobs and spending every spare moment recording. One day Tim invited me to their apartment studio where they were going to record gang vocals on Wake Up. They wanted to get all their friends on the track, including all of Wolf Parade, but only Tim’s roommate, Matt Brown, and I showed up.3

By the late summer of 2004, advance copies of Funeral had been floating among critics for a few months. The band’s North American tour in June, opening up for their friends in the Unicorns, made a huge impression on all who witnessed it. Like Berman with Broken Social Scene, I indulged in nepotism and wrote an Arcade Fire cover story for Exclaim! the month of Funeral’s release. (The album came out the same day as Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire and Tegan and Sara’s So Jealous.) The language I used in the story would have read as ridiculous hyperbole if my peers across the continent didn’t already agree with me. This band was not just people I happened to know. This band was going to be huge.

And yet I still doubted my own instincts. If I knew anything about commercial appeal, I’d be marketing music instead of writing about it. But I didn’t, and I don’t.

North Carolina’s Merge Records thought they were being ambitious when they pressed 10,000 copies of Funeral, an unusually high number for an obscure indie band’s debut album. But it sold out of its first pressing in a week and went on to sell more than one million copies worldwide. In the pre-Napster era, it likely would have sold at least three times that amount. Maybe 10 times. A curious thing for historians writing about this time is that there’s no real metric for an artist’s popularity in the pre-streaming era, during the decline of physical media.

A month after its release, my girlfriend at the time, Helen Spitzer, and I drove some of Arcade Fire down to New York City for the CMJ festival in October 2004. Their tour hadn’t started yet, but between the demand for the suddenly hard-to-find album and the glowing reviews—including a game-changing one in Pitchfork—the hype was now huge. The money wasn’t, though. To paraphrase the Constantines’ Some Party, the season’s new rock hopefuls were still just hoping to get paid. That’s why they were hitching a ride to their official New York City launch with two music critics. They didn’t even have a manager yet. (They did, however, have a New York lawyer.)

Win Butler, one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met, was seeing his vision come true; he was probably more prepared than the others. Violinist Sarah Neufeld, who came from the world of modern dance and electroacoustic music, picked my meagre brain during the drive back to Montreal: What might all of this mean in terms of actual numbers? How many copies might they actually sell? I knew that American indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo might be lucky to sell 100,000, newer acts like Bright Eyes might sell half that, but I didn’t really have any more of a sense of it than she did. My lifelong love of Canadian underdogs had lowered my expectations considerably. Expectations changed after that week.

While Arcade Fire were slaying New York City, the Constantines were likely on a stage somewhere, spreading a gospel, Bry Webb testifying and howling, Can I get a witness?

By the dawn of 2005, for him and everyone else in this book, witnesses were no longer hard to come by.

1 First on the bill that night at Lee’s Palace was a guy Royal City had met at a show in Brooklyn: an unknown singer-songwriter named Sufjan Stevens. Rounding out the bill was Deep Dark United, a band featuring Alex Lukashevsky, whose earlier band opened Godspeed’s first Toronto show.

2 It didn’t. It came out so close to the deadline that few critics outside Toronto had heard it. But it landed on plenty of lists in 2003.

3 We did several takes. The hook, as every fan can tell you, is insanely high; it’s way out of my limited range. Wolf Parade drummer Arlen Thompson told me later he too was part of an earlier group vocal take on the song, which got cut. I highly doubt my voice is on the final version, though the very generous Tim assures me it is—and that’s what I tell my child.

Chapter 2

National Hum

Setting the Stage

"More and more neglected hands

Judgment ripe, they’re starting bands

Working on a new solution"

—Constantines, National Hum, 2003

On stage at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1904, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier boldly declared that the 20th century shall be the century of Canada. The political entity of Canada was still very new; Laurier had been 25 years old at the time of Confederation. Canada was still very much a colonial outpost that looked to Britain for guidance. Laurier’s promise for the new century was trotted out in ensuing decades as either perpetually postponed potential or as hilarious hubris from a country of underachievers. Canadians spent the next 100 years waiting in vain for Laurier to be proven correct, for the country to stake its place in the world, for its culture to thrive.

But maybe Laurier’s pronouncement was just ahead by a century.1

Discovery channels

It’s strange now to recall the excitement people had in 1999 over a flip in the calendar. Everyone said the year 2000 in ways no one ever said the year 1994 or the year 1971. The year 2000 was a fantasy of the future for kids raised on The Jetsons, whose parents read Alvin Toffler and Buckminster Fuller. A year of rebirth, of renewal, of potential. The new millennium! Let’s all meet up in the year 2000! Y2K, it turned out okay! Two-thousand-zero-zero, party over, oops, out of time!

The music industry was at a crucial turning point in its history, which rolled out over the next five years. In 2000, record companies had just had their most profitable year ever, riding high on teen pop and CD sales. Independent artists still made money from sales of physical product, even though peer-to-peer file-sharing was exploding, due to software like Napster and LimeWire. In 2000, print media and terrestrial radio were still crucial ways to learn about new music, soon to be complemented by message boards, blogs, satellite radio, and internet radio. The iTunes store launched in 2003, and MySpace a few months later. The latter became a major discovery engine for listeners, and easy for artists to use without middlemen. YouTube appeared in 2005, as did Pandora’s algorithm-based, paid-subscription streaming model, the basis of the music industry in the 2020s. It’s fitting that a Swedish band emerged called the Soundtrack of Our Lives at a time when it was never easier to soundtrack your life: to discover new artists from around the world, and for music to be a huge part of your identity.

Since the days of Wilfrid Laurier, Canadian music had difficulty being heard beyond its home and native land. Canada was (and is) a small market. No one else cared how popular you were in Canada. The country itself was not exotic enough to be interesting. No radio programmer or journalist in the world would ever open a package promising a hot new artist from Canada. There’s a reason the phrase worthwhile Canadian initiative is a long-standing joke in American newsrooms as the least enticing headline ever.

To successfully attract an international audience, Canadian musicians usually needed foreign record label support and ideally foreign radio and press—not to mention savvy management, a lot of luck and dogged determination to tour constantly and slowly build a fan base. It also helped to make music that sounded like everything else already popular in the world.

In the latter half of Laurier’s century, Canada had reliably managed to produce global superstars, the best of which were unique and groundbreaking (Joni Mitchell, Rush); others merely captured the zeitgeist with grand gestures inside an accepted commercial sphere (Bryan Adams, Céline Dion). Either way, those international success stories were occasional flare-ups from a country often ignored. Outside their home turf, the artists in question were rarely understood to be Canadian.

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler—born in California in 1982, raised in Texas, and whose mother idolized Joni Mitchell—didn’t know anything about Canada when his brother, Win, moved to Montreal in 2000. I could probably have told you it was in Quebec and they spoke French, he laughs. I probably didn’t know Leonard Cohen was a Montreal figure; I might have been able to tell you he was Canadian, but probably not.

Meanwhile, Canadians didn’t even know what exists inside their own borders. The people who tell us what Canadian culture is are oftentimes missing our best exports, says Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade. He grew up a big fan of Skinny Puppy, pioneers of industrial music. Skinny Puppy won’t ever get a tribute at the Junos or be included in a coffee-table book about Canadian music. They are internationally famous, he says. When you go to Europe and ask about Skinny Puppy, [people there] think they’re American, and Americans think they’re European. No one knows they’re Canadian, or that they’re from Vancouver. We do this over and over again, decade by decade: produce this music that impacts on a global level. And yet Canadians were the perpetual cultural underdogs of the Western world—without having a geographical excuse, like Australia or New Zealand.

That all changed starting in 2000, the year Dan Bejar of Destroyer sang, There is joy in being barred from the temple. A Canadian artist’s fate was no longer superstar or bust, thanks in large part to new methods of music discovery, ones not predicated on national media. You could be a weirdo making a record in your bedroom and disseminating it online, and you might get a rave review from afar before most people in your hometown had even heard of you. If the stars aligned, you might even sell hundreds of thousands of records without any real radio support. It didn’t matter if you were one woman with a synth and a drum machine, a turntablist with an absurd sense of humour, three folk-singing tree-planters or a nine-member art-rock collective. And if your neighbours are doing something equally innovative or interesting, then suddenly Canada as a whole looks a lot more intriguing to the rest of the world—for the first time in its musical history.

Vancouver band the New Pornographers put out their debut album, Mass Romantic, in November 2000 on a local indie label, Mint Records. Within weeks, the New York Times picked it as one of the best records of the year—something that hadn’t happened to any indie Canadian act ever, especially one that was barely known at home beyond the cover of Exclaim! magazine. The acclaim for Mass Romantic continued to spread at the same time that Toronto artist Peaches was becoming one of the biggest buzz acts in Europe—again, before most Canadians knew who she was.

The New Pornographers’ Carl Newman recalls, Somebody came up to me at [Manhattan club] Brownies in February 2001 and said, ‘Hey, you know, Canada’s kinda hip now. It’s getting a rep for music. You guys and Peaches.’ None of the other [Canadian] bands had shown up [in the U.S.] yet; we were the only two with any profile. That comment sticks in my head because it just seemed weird to me: us and Peaches. It doesn’t quite seem like a scene, but it’s cool.

Meanwhile, hometown bringdown was still real. I remember in 2001, Peaches had just started to be a thing, says singer-songwriter Owen Pallett. "I was reading [U.K. mag] Mojo, where they were interviewing people at some industry party, and asking what was the best thing that came out that year. Everyone named various records, then someone would run back over and say, ‘Oh, I forgot something: Peaches is amazing!’ The person next to them would be like, ‘Oh, yes, Peaches!’ Whereas in Toronto, people were like, ‘Who wants to listen to fucking Peaches?!’"

Take a look at what else came out in Canadian music in 2000: Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, the Weakerthans’ Left and Leaving, the Dears’ End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story, the Be Good Tanyas’ Blue Horse, Kid Koala’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Tegan and Sara’s This Business of Art, Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here, Destroyer’s Thief.

That same year, Win Butler moved to Montreal, hoping to find people to play in his band, Arcade Fire. Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning started recording as Broken Social Scene. Joel Plaskett started his eponymous band. Leslie Feist was touring her first solo album across Western Canada, playing to a few people sitting on the floor in Medicine Hat. The Hidden Cameras played their first gig at a Toronto art gallery. Montreal’s inaugural MUTEK festival secured the city’s place at the forefront of innovative electronic music in North America.

The question was no longer How did this come from Canada? It quickly became, How come there are so many great Canadian acts right now?

Everywhere we go, said Kevin Drew in November 2003, people are always asking what kind of city [Toronto] is and [whether] we know this band or that band. It feels wonderful to know that the 32-block radius that you live in is being analyzed in Louisville, Kentucky, and Berlin. That same month, Broken Social Scene’s picture ran beneath a headline in GQ that read, Is Canada cooler than us?

In February 2005, both Spin and the New York Times ran big profiles of the Montreal scene; the full-page photo leading off the Spin piece was of a band yet to release their debut album: Wolf Parade. By June 2005, Spin’s review of British Columbian band Hot Hot Heat joked about the Buy Canadian! movement in music. By that point—especially after the runaway success of Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut, Funeral—international media were turning their eyes and ears north like never before. In October 2005, BBC Radio 2 aired a two-hour special called The Maple Music Revolution, featuring interviews with Arcade Fire, Kathleen Edwards, Sarah Harmer and—yes—Nickelback, who in December 2009 Billboard declared the bestselling group of the decade, beating out Destiny’s Child.

Arcade Fire’s real breakthrough moment—when they proved to a large U.S. audience that their live show could deliver on six months of hype—was at the 2005 Coachella festival in California, where six other Canadian acts joined them on the all-star bill, including Tegan and Sara, k-os, and Buck 65, and only one of which, Sloan, came from a previous generation. I felt there was some magic at that Coachella ’05, says Buck 65. It was one of the few times in my life where I felt, ‘It feels kinda badass to be a Canadian right now.’ For a few years that’s all people would talk about in interviews. ‘How do you explain this Canadian thing that’s going on?’

This arose from a generation of kids born in the 1970s, who were raised on the pride and cultural protectionism of Pierre Trudeau and on the entrepreneurship and free trade policies of Brian Mulroney. A musically curious generation raised on MuchMusic, a Toronto-based broadcaster invested in myth-making from various regions of the country and where genres of music collided in a pre-poptimist context: Voivod next to the Rankin Family next to Michie Mee next to Tom Cochrane. A generation who grew up watching Degrassi High and The Kids in the Hall, two internationally successful shows beloved because they were dorky and unique and Canadian, not in spite of it. This generation learned to build up their own community, shake off any potential inferiority complex and then take their mission to the world, no matter how weird it might seem.

Let’s not party like it’s 1999

To understand 2000, dial it back even just one year, to 1999. Live music was in peril: dance clubs thrived, DJs ruled, and bubblegum pop ruled the charts. Hip-hop was eclipsing rock music, and pop as well, but the Canadian industry was woefully (wilfully?) underequipped to figure it out. Something called electronica cast its shadow everywhere, even though no one knew what it meant—or they didn’t want to, despite the international success of Plastikman from Windsor, Ontario. Third-rate grunge ruled rock radio and nu-metal was on the rise. The underground was abandoning songwriting and becoming obsessed with post-rock that appealed primarily to eggheads (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The indie boom of the early to mid-’90s had gone bust: joyless audiences sat on the floor, if they showed up to gigs at all. Dave Matthews was a thing. Live, raw rock’n’roll was as niche as jazz. Only the garage-rock underground was thriving—and largely preaching to the converted.

Almost every musical genre seemed to be in a state of flux. An old-school major label deal seemed impossible, and likely not worth the trouble anyway. That said, major labels had a lot of money from the CD era and were throwing it at anything they could: Ska! Lounge! Trip-hop! Swing! Nothing wrong with a hodgepodge of styles defining a scene, of course. As Canadians are constantly told, Diversity is our strength. But there’s a big difference between a landfill of assorted refuse and a flourishing ecosystem.

Canada’s major musical exports throughout the ’90s were solo women. Alanis Morissette was the first Canadian to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.2 Shania Twain was the bestselling female country artist of all time. Diana Krall was the last jazz superstar of the 20th century. Loreena McKennitt sold millions of copies as an independent Celtic folk act. Sarah McLachlan had enough star wattage to commandeer one of the most historically significant ventures in mainstream music, the Lilith Fair.

Rock groups did not fare as well, with only Barenaked Ladies (belatedly) making any impact at all outside the country, with a No. 1 Billboard hit in 1998. Sloan, Blue Rodeo and the Tragically Hip were resigning themselves to cult status at best outside Canada. One of the biggest Canadian pop bands in the domestic market was literally a cartoon (Prozzäk), while another looked like one (the Moffatts). Homegrown hip-hop had been entirely invisible, even to most Canadians, since the days of Snow and the Dream Warriors—and there are plenty of structural reasons to blame for that. The Rascalz’ 1998 single Northern Touch was in part so epochal because so little had changed in the 10 years since the breakthrough of Maestro Fresh Wes.

In 1999, unless it was one of the aforementioned solo female superstars, you would never see an upcoming Canadian artist on the cover of an American or British music magazine—or, for that matter, even find one of their records reviewed inside. Rolling Stone was more likely to put a Canadian actor (Jim Carrey, Pamela Anderson) on the cover than a Canadian musician. The acknowledged influence of underground figures fared better, like D.O.A., NoMeansNo, Skinny Puppy, Mecca Normal—all Vancouver or Victoria acts of the ’80s who made more inroads down the West Coast and in Europe than they ever did in Toronto or Montreal. Winnipeg’s Propagandhi and Halifax’s Sloan were two of the only exceptions in the ’90s. Toronto acts were usually left in the dust, other than Cowboy Junkies. While all those acts received some attention, there were certainly no breathless hyperboles being doled out. In 1999, you could have polled the average music listener—or even most critics, whose job involves musical discovery—and not find a Canadian album in their top 10 of the year. That includes critics at Canadian publications.

Whether you made mainstream music or not, the rest of the world wasn’t waiting to hear more from Canada, and Canadians barely knew how to market themselves beyond even our interprovincial borders. You had little chance of pleasing anyone else. Might as well make music to please yourself.

I’m learning to survive, sang the Constantines, on earthworms and houseflies.

The history of Canadian music is that of independence. Until the 1970s, artists almost certainly had to leave the country to have any kind of career: hence Nova Scotian Hank Snow’s I’m Movin’ On, a song that spent 21 weeks atop the Billboard charts in 1950. Proper recording studios weren’t built here until Jack Richardson’s Nimbus 9 Soundstage Recording Studio in 1972; he famously remortgaged his house to finance the first Guess Who album. Stompin’ Tom Connors ran his own label, Boot Records, which released regional favourites from across the nation, including Indigenous artists and a fair amount of Jamaica-to-Toronto reggae as well. Rush started their own label because no one would sign them and licensed their albums out to majors as they became more popular. Superstar Corey Hart was signed to Aquarius Records, a Montreal indie that first struck gold with April Wine in the ’70s (and later with Sum 41 in the 2000s). Punk rockers like to think they invented DIY, but if punk and DIY are inextricably linked, then every Canadian musician has always been a punk.

But in 1999, punk was dead—or, at the very least, beyond meaningless. Five years after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the Woodstock ’99 lineup was filled with punks, and MuchMusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee described it as the total breakdown of ‘civilized society,’ where corporate greed and a clash of college bros and idyllic hippies devolved into a throng of shit-throwing, raping and pillaging ravagers. She wasn’t remotely exaggerating. New definitions were needed on every level, in every genre.

Artists could spend a lot of energy trying to second-guess trends—or they could just turn off the noise and do whatever they want. In Toronto on Queen Street at the time, says Hawksley Workman, with people like Spookey Ruben and John Southworth, it was, ‘How weird can we get? How niche? How oddball?’ [EMI Publishing’s] Mike McCarty was handing out $10,000 publishing deals to a lot of bands back then, and that felt like a million dollars. Only a couple of bands, like Sum 41, ever became anything. None of us had any money, so it was an easy time when Toronto was kind of grungy and grimy and we could all live really cheap and entertain ourselves by passing around cassette demos and trying to blow each other’s minds. Because that’s all we had.

The time was ripe for a seismic shift, one that would have ripples for decades to come.

Shaking the stigma

Every five years in popular music—the amount of time it takes someone to get from grade 8 to grade 12—there’s an inevitable generational shift: a teenager in 1990 will reject Rush and Rough Trade; a teenager in 2000 will reject the Tragically Hip and Blue Rodeo; a teenager in 2020 will think Drake is an old man. Meanwhile, Canada’s strong continuum of groundbreakers and non-mainstream artists have often been written out of history, a blight that’s only been rectified in recent years, helped by a wealth of obscurities resurfacing either online or in official reissues. Canadians make a choice—conscious or otherwise—to be swamped by American and British culture. It’s very easy for young Canadians of every generation to believe everyone knows this is nowhere—whether or not they know the Neil Young song in question.

I’ve always hated Canadian music, Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras said in 2004, citing proto-riot grrrls Mecca Normal and Fifth Column as two lonely exceptions. Especially in the ’90s, the music scene was not good—but it’s typical for Canadians to say that it’s good. It’s like having a magazine policy where you’re not allowed to give bad reviews to Canadian bands. It doesn’t help the culture. Gibb’s own band, perhaps naturally, appealed to people who had zero interest in the Tea Party or Our Lady Peace, if they even knew who those artists were. We played a show at Shepherds Bush Hall in England, he said, and there were these fans who actually said, ‘I don’t want to be rude or whatever, but I just can’t believe you’re from Canada!’ They were going on and on about it, and it was supposed to be a compliment.

Joel Carriere, who started Dine Alone Records and has managed Alexisonfire since they formed in 2001, worked at a record store when the Constantines’ self-titled debut came in a hand-assembled cardboard sleeve with an actual match inside it, urging the listener to start their own metaphorical fire. Intrigued—and frustrated that it didn’t fit in display cases—Carriere listened to it and was blown away, recommending it to regular customer Dallas Green, who also fell in love. Then I found out they were Canadian, says Carriere. At the time, in the ’90s, things would sound ‘Canadian.’ Then, in the 2000s, nothing sounded ‘Canadian’—everything just sounded good or bad.

Basia Bulat is a Toronto singer-songwriter who signed to U.K. label Rough Trade in 2007. Five years earlier, she was a campus radio DJ in London, Ontario, energized by her playlist. She’d grown up as a massive fan of Sloan and Hayden, and now dozens of new Canadian records were showing up at the radio station every month, which inspired her to pursue her own musical path. The radio station’s guidelines were to play at least 40% Canadian content, but we’d end up playing almost 100%, she says. There was so much we loved. It wasn’t even hard. Everything that was coming into the station, we’d get so excited.

Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean recalls going to see a very early New Pornographers show, with Dave Wenger of Daddy’s Hands. They knew some of the band through friends of friends. We were watching them play and were trying to make fun of them, says McBean, "but then we realized, Oh wait, this band is really fucking good."

About the New Pornographers in 2002, one Houston magazine wrote, Despite the obvious benefits that the Band, Neil Young, Daniel Lanois and others have heaped upon the world, few word pairs evince an instant smirk like ‘Canadian rock.’ In 2003, the Universal Records exec who signed Sam Roberts told Maclean’s, We have a saying [in the U.S.]: if you’re from Canada you’re either going to become one of the world’s biggest acts or you won’t be able to get arrested. There’s no middle ground—either you’re Céline, Alanis, Sarah, Avril [Lavigne] or Nelly [Furtado], or you’re the Tea Party, Matthew Good, Sloan, the Tragically Hip.

Except that of course there’s a middle ground, and only a narrow-minded corporate suit with blockbusters on their mind would think otherwise. While the mega-merger-minded industry ignored that middle ground, a whole lot of Canadian music came out of nowhere, often rewriting the rules of their supposed genre boundaries. Kid Koala was a turntablist who didn’t make hip-hop. Caribou had more in common with psychedelic jazz than electronic music of the day. The Weakerthans were a punk band with folk songs and a poet at the core. Peaches flipped all kinds of scripts. Broken Social Scene rewrote the rules of what defines a rock band.

Only the most minuscule minority of musicians could ever hope to be within close proximity of mainstream success. By definition, the mainstream does not include everybody, says Peaches. It just includes a traditional path. We all need to find out who we are and find a path, and if you look to the mainstream, then you’re going to have a lot of problems understanding who you are. Because 99% of the time, you’re not really going to be included in the way you want to express yourself.

Everything changed in July 1999, when a decidedly non-mainstream Montreal band almost no one had heard of—weirdos who purposely avoided ties to industry capital—somehow ended up on the cover of Britain’s most influential music publication.

The big bang

"The first indication that something different was going on was when Godspeed You! Black Emperor appeared on the cover of the NME, says Howard Bilerman, who partnered with members of that band to create the Hotel 2 Tango studio in 2000. No one in Montreal had ever seen someone from here on the cover of that magazine—or even written about. If something that was Canadian was written about in a U.S. or U.K. publication, it was like, wow, we penetrated a fortress. But to be on the cover of those magazines? Never. That I’d never seen in my lifetime."

And yet ironies abound. Yes, a story about Godspeed was on the cover—but the band wasn’t, because they refused to be photographed. It was the first NME cover story in history not to feature a photo of the artist: instead it was an image of a storm with text from the spoken-word intro to The Dead Flag Blues. Godspeed has only ever given maybe 10 interviews in their history, mostly railing about how they’re portrayed in the press (after being goaded by journalists complaining about unrequited love). So it’s more than a bit amusing that the one magazine this Canadian anticapitalist band would agree to talk to would be a British music tabloid—which is why they did it, precisely because it seemed so absurd.."3

What’s even funnier is that the Godspeed issue was one of the lowest-selling in the magazine’s history; an editorial later that year even lamented the choice to put them on the cover. But the effect was galvanizing. I’d seen Godspeed at the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol a couple of weeks earlier, one NME reader told the Guardian years later. "It was an incredible set: cramped, sweat dripping from the ceiling, ridiculously noisy, two drummers. To then see them on the cover of the NME, which seemed to be an endless procession of the usual Britpop faces, was amazing."

Ro Cemm is a British journalist and show promoter who, as a teen, felt alienated by the boorish lad culture of ’90s Britpop and found himself drawn to Swedish and Canadian music instead. Godspeed’s NME cover was a life-changing moment for the future Canuckophile. I was 17 in 1999, and it was a massive deal for me to have this [obscure Canadian] music that I had discovered and loved held up alongside the biggest bands in the world, he says. I think I had that cover on my wall for about three years. It was gloriously strange, and folks were still talking about it years later.

Once Godspeed cracked that door open, perceptions of Canadian music were forever altered—if any perception of it had existed before. It was a pretty low bar. For non-Canadians, says Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, Canada was a coherent unit. They didn’t know how goddamn big it is. Of course, people in Montreal only identify as being from Montreal. But there was this weird thing where the border matters more than you think it would: there’s more back and forth between Montreal and Toronto, or even Montreal and Vancouver. It’s the same swirl of ideas. And it wasn’t like the Avril Lavigne moment or the Nickelback moment. There was a DIY-ness to it; it was a scrappy moment.

There were all these mini scenes with people in them all trying to do the same thing, says Stars’ Torquil Campbell. I didn’t know anyone in Arcade Fire or the Weakerthans or Godspeed. We all felt very different from each other then, but if you listen to that music now, it’s so similar—all of it. The spirit of it, and the fact we weren’t afraid to use horns and violins and orchestral instrumentation. We’d all come through an education system where you had to be in band or in orchestra. There was this epic aspect to all of it that was of a kind, even though we didn’t all hang out with each other.

Stephen McBean of Black Mountain says, Things started to change from, ‘Oh hey, you’re from Canada: do you know a guy named Fred?’ To, ‘Hey, you’re from Canada: do you know Godspeed?’ The question didn’t seem that strange, with nine people in the Montreal band. And besides, McBean actually did know the band from the other side of the country: in 2009, his side project Pink Mountaintops made a record with violinist Sophie Trudeau of Godspeed. They met at a mutual friend’s wedding.

Because of Godspeed’s 20-minute instrumental songs, it was obvious they were going to exist outside normal rock paradigms. But even in experimental circles, they were outliers. Everything was post-rave in the U.K. and Europe, says Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck when talking about their early tours there. "When we’d do interviews, it wasn’t just odd to [Europeans] that we had string instruments: there was this idea that [in the future] there would only be DJs. So the idea that we played instruments at all, for German journalists, was fascinating." The late ’90s was the era when there was a minor moral panic over the idea that turntables might be outselling guitars.

Godspeed also set the template for what would soon become a cliché: the co-ed Canadian band with six or more people, at least one of whom has to play the violin and/or cello. Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene didn’t sound like Godspeed or each other, but all three embraced the Big Sound—all three bands, in their own way, defying every expectation of what rock music had settled for at that point in its history, and very different from the new wave of rock bands in the U.S., primarily from New York City. The American bands were stripped down to bare basics: the White Stripes and the Black Keys were duos. The Big Sound was a very Canadian thing: New Pornographers, Hidden Cameras, Black Mountain, Hey Rosetta! The more people on stage, the better. Hell, even our best-known punk band, Fucked Up, had six people in it. Everyone had side projects; concentric circles enveloped dozens more. Federalism at work. That literal representation of community embodied the explosion of talent and ambition coming out of every corner of the country.

Godspeed referred to itself as a collective and would often issue press releases written in the first-person plural. Some other bands got labelled a collective, like Broken Social Scene, a band founded by two men but featuring multiple lead singers and a large pool of players, any of whom may or may not be on any given tour. That doesn’t mean every large band is a collective. That certainly wasn’t true of the Hidden Cameras, where bandleader Joel Gibb considered everyone interchangeable—and as a result, most of his band started their own.

When the New Pornographers became one of the first breakthroughs of the new era in 2000, they were half-jokingly referred to in the indie press as a supergroup. Yet principal songwriter Carl Newman had led Zumpano, one of the least successful Sub Pop bands of the last decade, whereas secondary songwriter Dan Bejar released obscure indie records championed by nobody who didn’t work at Scratch Records or at Exclaim! Only singer Neko Case, who released her second solo album earlier that year, was remotely recognizable, even though drummer Ryan Dahle had radio hits and Big Shiny Tunes with his bands Age of Electric and Limblifter. The idea that this combination of people would constitute a hot, hyped supergroup was laughable even to the New Pornographers themselves—except that as their popularity grew, the phrase was repeated, non-ironically, in every mention of the band.

Soon every Canadian ensemble with more than one singer or who had active side projects was either a collective or a supergroup or both. Meanwhile, the American trios Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleater-Kinney and the Gossip didn’t even have bassists.

How did a country with a sparse population spread across a massive geographical distance produce so many large bands? I’ve always felt there were some material reasons for the Canadian mainstream music success—like [public] health care, says the Weakerthans’ John K. Samson. My theory is that you don’t have a Broken Social Scene in America because a giant group of people on stage is not feasible if you have to pay for health care.

Bay of funding

The other obvious answer is arts funding, which made Canadians the envy of their American peers—their European peers, less so. Funding is an incredibly complex and fraught issue. It doesn’t explain the success of many artists in this book, many of whom didn’t access funding until they were well established, if they ever did at all. Labels like Constellation and Three Gut made a splash without any funding. The system is usually rigged in favour of people who’ve already proven themselves by one measure or another.

Grants are a big part of this story, for how this all happened, says Vancouver singer-songwriter Geoff Berner. Independent people started to figure out how to game the system the way the majors had been doing. [The system] was a filter to keep poor people and real independent musicians out. That was the whole spirit of the rules. But if you could meet the letter of the rules, you could get some of the money.

Since the Massey Commission’s report of 1951, there has been arts funding in Canada—though its effect on what can loosely be called pop music didn’t kick in until decades later. In 1971, CanCon regulations came into effect requiring radio stations to play a minimum of 30% Canadian content—which led to more Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot and Guess Who on Canadian radios than anyone could bear. Ten years later, private radio broadcasters decided—not entirely altruistically—to found FACTOR (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Record), with the intention of further developing the domestic music scene. Frankly, they wanted more selection to fulfill CanCon requirements: it was in their best interest to invest in more domestic music. VideoFACT, funded entirely by MuchMusic, arrived in 1984 (and ended in 2017). FACTOR itself got a boost in 1986 when the federal government stepped in as a funding partner.

It was easy to get touring grants then, says Trish Klein of the Be Good Tanyas, who became an artist manager later in her career. You just needed to have a distribution agreement in hand, and an album finished, and a couple of show contracts—the rest could be made up, like 15 shows but only two contracts. You’d get 50% of your shortfall up to a certain amount. You’d rely on your merchandise to fill the gap. Our first couple of years, the FACTOR grants enabled us to do low-level touring: hotels, vehicles, food. The tour wouldn’t have paid for itself without the FACTOR money. But you can’t get FACTOR touring money now without getting a sound recording grant first.

The new kid on the block was the Radio Starmaker Fund, founded in 2000, again by private broadcasters, with a focus on marketing Canadians abroad—because, of course, Canadians are far more likely to listen to snowbirds who succeed elsewhere first. It offered to match, or exceed by a maximum of twice as much, the money the artist (or, more likely, the artist’s management and/or record company) was planning to spend on marketing and/or touring. (Marketing can include videos, publicity, website design, photo shoots, digital media distribution, etc.)

Touring is a different story. As of 2021, Radio Starmaker offered a subsidy of $2,500 per domestic or foreign gig, with the number of gigs capped per territory. That’s cash on top of guarantees or box office receipts; in other words, even if no one comes to your shows, your expenses will have been covered by the Radio Starmaker grant. Little to none of that money goes into an artist’s pocket: it goes to tech crew, tour manager, transportation, accommodation, etc. This fund was key for Canadian artists touring in the U.S., Europe and beyond.

Radio Starmaker’s arrival in 2000 coincides with the trajectory of many artists in this book—although only about half of them benefited from it, and to varying degrees. Broken Social Scene—a band everyone assumes must be funded—only got it six times (of 42 opportunities) between 2001 and 2011, just as often as Propagandhi and fewer times than Owen Pallett, Feist or the Dears. Broken Social Scene did, however, get the most in dollars ($600,653) during that decade, followed by Metric ($553,671, not including $91,663 for Emily Haines’s solo efforts), Dallas Green’s solo project City and Colour ($513,320) and his original band, Alexisonfire ($509,158). Again: that money does not go to the artists; it goes to crew, tour expenses, video productions and more. It certainly makes U.S. musicians intensely jealous, especially when combined with public health care.

Did Radio Starmaker make or break any of its most funded acts? Not to the point where the fund can be solely credited for any artist’s success, no, not at all. With the exception of Feist, no artist in this book had a breakout international video hit, or became successful solely through clever marketing that might have been assisted by funding. But Radio Starmaker did make touring—especially abroad—a more feasible venture for many, assuming the act in question had already sold enough records to qualify and had capital of their own to invest. Some more popular bands (like Broken Social Scene and Stars) clearly benefited; others, like the Hidden Cameras or Black Mountain, never got its funding at all. And there are many names on Radio Starmaker lists that are real head-scratchers, either for their obscurity (Stabilo, Kazzer) or their popularity (Bruce Cockburn, Sum 41).

Most important, Radio Starmaker was yet another pool of money to draw from. There’s FACTOR money for everything: recording an album or demo, touring, showcasing, operational grants for labels and festivals, etc. It’s all a huge investment in the very existence of Canadian music that can’t be understated. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get funding, especially early in one’s career. All of these programs don’t foster innovation: they support something that’s already working. Which is important and valid and essential, even if it’s easy to poke holes in specific funding decisions from any side of the political spectrum.

It’s insane. The impact cannot be dismissed, says Carl Newman. As absurd as it might sound, a lot of this is just to handle losses. You get touring grants so you don’t lose your shirt on tours. We get so used to them, but when I talk to musicians in the U.S., I realize how lucky we are. That’s the reason I got to tour in Australia, New Zealand or Japan. If you don’t get as big as Arcade Fire, it’s hard.

Also overlooked is the difference between loans and grants; a lot of FACTOR money was a loan. I got a recording loan for my first solo album, says Newman, and I felt cheated when I actually had to pay some of it back. It’s like, ‘Oh no, this backfired, it sold! Are you kidding me, FACTOR? I have to give you 15 grand?!’ That changed in 2014, when FACTOR became a grant-only body.

Danko Jones’s career has largely been in Europe, where he has No. 1 hits on rock radio and regular main-stage slots at large festivals. That’s in part been possible because of FACTOR touring grants. It’s also made the band a punching bag for those who think repeat grant recipients are a leech on the system.

Absolutely, we benefited from that; we were a success story, says Jones. "A lot of the criticism is levelled at people taking advantage of the system. We became successful due in large part to the help it gave us. Of course, nothing might have come of it if we sucked as a band. But we were a good band that connected with an audience abroad. Sometimes you need a step up. We don’t come from wealthy backgrounds, and touring grants helped us directly.

I remember seeing Avril Lavigne, who already had platinum records, getting grants, and thinking [that] would ruin [the perception of funding] for bands like us, who have never had a gold record, Danko continues. He says funding critics have some good points, but please don’t include us in that. We paid back every penny of our loans. Maybe we got grants, but we didn’t use them to spend 80% on alcohol, 20% on the recording budget and the producer is my brother. You know? Though I’m 100% sure that has happened—which sucks for real musicians.

Geoff Berner tells the story of a Vancouver promoter who figured out ways, in the late ’90s, to get his roster of non-commercial punks and odd folkies over to Europe on FACTOR’s dime: He would [tell FACTOR] things like, ‘We’ve received an invitation to play an international festival of independent alternative music in Ljubljana, Slovenia. If you will pay for us to go and play this showcase, we might tack on a European tour after that.’ That would cover your airfare. Then his buddy Bobo on the ground in Ljubljana would make sure a website existed. The festival would be half Canadian acts booked by the one manager, the other half were Slovenian acts. FACTOR eventually realized they were bankrolling an entire festival in eastern Europe. And yet stunts not unlike this have helped dozens of Canadian artists get a foothold in Europe.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor got a FACTOR touring grant to subsidize their first European tour in 1998, an event that arguably facilitated many things in this book. But they didn’t go back to the well—or, at least, not until much later. "The moment our tours started breaking even, we stopped because it seemed immoral to take money out