“New Orleans Is Sinking” by The Tragically Hip

"New Orleans Is Sinking" came out of a rehearsal-room jam in Kingston: the Tragically Hip were banging away at "Shakin' All Over", and about 20 minutes in, it had turned into something else entirely. Gord Downie wrote the words about a trip he'd made to New Orleans in his university days, and the band put it on Up to Here, their first full-length album, sending it out as a single in November 1989.

Don Smith produced, and he keeps it lean and mean: Rob Baker and Paul Langlois lock their electric guitars into a greasy, swaggering riff, Gord Sinclair and Johnny Fay drive it hard, and Downie sings like a man with nowhere else to be. It topped the RPM Canadian Content chart, became their first song to chart in the US, and turned into a signature song that Canadian radio still won't let go. On stage the middle opened up for Downie's stories, most famously the one about cleaning a killer whale tank.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.