Ahead by a Century

As a Canadian, this one means a lot to me. The passing of Gord Downie years ago really hit hard, and The Hip were a huge influence on me growing up. I’m honoured to be able to release this.

Just to clear a few things up: This is in open C tuning, but with a capo on the 2nd fret, so the overall tonality is D. For the chords, when I go to the G chord, on guitar it’s essentially a Gmaj7 with a B in the bass. But once the bass comes in, it’s playing G underneath anyway, so you could also just think of it as a Gmaj7 in the full mix. Live, Gord kept things more straightforward using standard tuning with D, C, G, and A as the main chords.

In this video I’m following Rob Baker’s guitar parts while dressed as Gord, so just didn’t want that to be confusing. Also worth noting, around measure 67, there’s a part where I originally played the Cadd9 shape (3-2-3), but I later noticed another guitar (left speaker) adding a pinky on the 5th fret of the B string. Feel free to include that if you want that extra detail.

Such a great song, brings back a lot of memories growing up.