“It’s a complicated arrangement of many characters who are unrelated,” his brother says. “There are stacks of paper for each song,” Rock says.Ī graduate of film studies at Queen’s University, Downie wrote a film treatment related to the album. He and Rock chipped away at it endlessly lyrics were rewritten often. He was a more content person when he was working on something.”ĭownie threw himself head-deep into Lustre Parfait. “He would fully admit that he needed the companionship of a project. “He liked the challenge of working with different people, and he wanted to expand his range as a songwriter and be able to write any kind of song,” says Patrick Downie. On the flurry of other non-Hip albums released in the 2010s, Downie worked at different times with the Skydiggers’ Josh Finlayson, the Sadies, Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla and Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew.Īs a collaborator, Downie was prolific and promiscuous. Rock was a big part of that experimentation, both on the Hip albums he produced and with the Lustre Parfait project. “I think he was pushing the band to its limits, and with that came experimentation.” “I think Gord wanted more out of life,” says Tyson Parker, who at the time was vice-president, corporate communications and media and artist relations for the Hip’s label, Universal Music Canada. When the making of Lustre Parfait began, Downie was restless. Rock says he was working on other projects at the time and that Downie was “busy with the Hip.” For whatever reason, the album was shelved. The songs were recorded in Maui, Toronto, Bryan Adams’s Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, even a hotel room at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles. “We were just laughing,” Rock recalls, “because we thought it was so great.” One of the first songs completed was The North Shore. Rock sent him computer files of music he had been working on Downie sent back lyrics. “We established a very close relationship.”Īfter the two Hip albums were done, Downie approached Rock about working together, just the two of them. “Our friendship was based on being fathers, being Canadian and loving hockey,” Rock says. Downie and the Winnipeg-born producer hit it off. Rock had produced the Hip albums World Container and We Are the Same, released in 20, respectively. Every lost album has a story (with accompanying mythology), and the curious Rock-Downie creation is no exception. Yet the record took years to see the light of day. How does he think Lustre Parfait stacks up? “I truly believe it is one of the best things I’ve done in my life.” Rock has earned 17 Juno nominations, won two Grammys, is a member of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and produced Metallica’s fabled Black Album. Rock, who co-founded the Vancouver-based eighties rock band the Payolas before going on to work with the likes of Aerosmith, Cher, Bon Jovi, Michael Bublé and the Hip, wrote the music, played the guitars and put it all together. The album is the eighth to bear Downie’s name outside the Hip, and the third to be released posthumously. “Some things are worth losing for,” he sings, “so, baby, I try to be something more.” Something More is brash and heralding – again, the horns – with Downie as an artist-warrior announcing his raison d’être. The stomping lead track, Greyboy Says, begins with “A-woo hoo” from Downie, never before considered an a-woo-hoo kind of guy. The horn-happy title song swaggers buoyantly. Lustre Parfait, recorded intermittingly between 20, is a gleaming, dynamic album of 14 pop-orientated rock songs busting at the seams. “I told him that of course I would,” Rock says. Downie told Rock to make sure everybody heard the lost album. Most people did not know the recordings existed. The two had made an unreleased album together.
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