"What, wait, what?" he asks over and over, only to find himself answering the same way every time, "Safe is dead," his voice eventually giving way to a muted scream. A few songs later, he can't resist dancing the line between open-hearted vulnerability and macabre wryness. "I've gotten more than most and yet," Downie sings on "Wolf's Home," his voice soaring into the ether. The tracks unfold like love letters and thank yous, bequests and graceful goodbyes, and tucked in between those things, a few moments of fear, anger and regret.
That means that the codes in these songs require a different set of decryption tools. But Downie's lyrical hallmarks are evident throughout Introduce Yerself, and it's easy to assume that, with his diagnosis looming, he wanted to leave nothing behind or unsaid. Recorded in just two four-day sessions in January 2016 and February 2017, the album was produced by Kevin Drew, who receives a co-writer credit on some of the songs. Now, in his end, Downie is a lighthouse calling us home. He was constellations, fireworks, a silver road in the moon. There were so many middles and he was so many different kinds of shine: a street lamp blinking in the snow the sun glinting off of Lake Ontario a neon sign crackling through the night. In the beginning, Downie was a flashlight searching the darkness for surprises, things lost, buried treasure, hidden meanings and arcane delights.
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