The 15 Greatest Weakerthans Songs

The Weakerthans don’t make acquaintances. They are favorite band material. Indeed, they were the first “serious” group on whom I bestowed that title—my gateway from green pop punk to, in some ways, everything. It was their CDs perpetually whirring in the janky disc drive of my first car, their bright, crispy guitars and and John K. Samson’s socially astute poetics that underscored the intense watercolor whirl of my late teens—when you saw your friends every day of the week and aimless night drives had movie-script endings, and you deluded yourself that you were the main character and this was all the preface to something special (which it was) and that you’d leave it all behind for better things (which you didn’t).

The Weakerthans didn’t leave either. Winnipeg, the gray, unassuming capital of Manitoba, was their forever home. Samson’s stories were scraped off of its underpasses, apartment buildings and office blocks, and eulogized its sharp-elbowed citizens, fueling a four-album fire of quietly revolutionary fringe rock. Fallow came first. Released in 1997, it followed Samson’s departure from riotous skate punks Propagandhi. He hung up his bass in order to co-found Arbeiter Ring Publishing (now ARP Books). But it wasn’t long before he, drummer Jason Tait, and bassist John P. Sutton started a new band—a musical conduit for the kind of left-wing literature ARP was publishing at the time. “I try and take really small, detailed notes about the world, and hope that I can extrapolate a story, and therefore a politics, from that,” Samson once said. And with a name that nodded to the 1915 trade union anthem “Solidarity Forever,” the Weakerthans were no less political than Propagandhi. Rather, they resolved to balance rage with rumination, telegraphing their views more subtly.

Three years after Fallow came Left and Leaving. Due much to the addition of lead guitarist Stephen Carroll, the album furthered the Weakerthans’ patient, intellectual approach towards life’s impermanence and immorality—its songs are longer, slower and more considered. Reconstruction Site came third and was, arguably, the third bowl of porridge—certainly the band’s critical and commercial peak—with high-budget music videos; that one song about the cat (which everyone and their dog has done a cover version of); a story arc that made it not exactly a concept album but very much conceptual.

Released on this day in 2003, Reconstruction Site is now 20 years old. Not wanting to let this anniversary pass unceremoniously, we’ve ranked the band’s 15 greatest songs across all four albums—including Reconstruction Site’s experimental, underrated follow-up Reunion Tour—to act as a guide for new listeners and to remind old ones of the sounds the band found for them.

15. “Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)” (Reconstruction Site, 2003)
This irreverent short story—whose title leaves little to the imagination—presents a mealtime conversation between the venerable French philosopher and a retired member of Ernest Shackleton’s Weddell Sea crew. Easily the silliest and most fun-loving Weakerthans cut, it’s an inapt start to the best-songs rundown. But beneath John K. Samson’s sincerity was always an undertow of humor. Here, on the anomalous single from the band’s contemptive, quietly profound opus, he lets that humor take center stage, deferring to French-speaking penguins, hungry huskies, and jangling barre chords, who light the way back to dear old Antarctica.

14. “Fallow” (Fallow, 1999)
The beloved singalong “One Great City!” so perfectly encapsulates Samson’s love-hate relationship with Winnipeg that it eclipses the other discussions of hometown disharmony that litter the Weakerthans’ catalog. Take this title track from their debut, whose wintry sonics and despondent imagery embalm the feeling of returning to a place that will never be the same now that it has one less resident. Over a bed of diffidently plucked electric guitars undercut by a sighing drum groove, Samson considers leaving behind the rusty train track ties but he can’t help returning, over and over, to the same conclusion: “And say that we’ll stay for one more year.” There’s no place like home, the song confirms with a sigh.

13. “Elegy for Elsabet” (Left and Leaving, 2000)
On its surface, “Elegy for Elsabet” is a great (if not slightly ponderous) song. Once you delve a little deeper into the lyrics’ meaning, though, it becomes a devastating song, and other than the “Virtute” suite, the one that most easily moves me to tears. Taking a narratorial role, Samson sings of a young hearing-impaired girl named Betta. He wills the clattering rain, the creaking doors, and braying horses to come to her aid, and concurrently illuminates the simple beauty in hearing (referenced later on the album during the “My Favourite Chords” lyric about the small bones in one’s inner ear) and how we take for granted life’s incidental sounds. The song’s outro employs an instrument called the whirly tube (also known as bloogle resonator) whose atonal, high-pitched hum puts us squarely in Betta’s shoes—as if we weren’t already.

12. “Night Windows” (Reunion Tour, 2007)
It was during the Reconstruction Site track “(Hospital Vespers)” that Samson first registered his interest in the American painter Edward Hopper, whose unique portrayals of loneliness share commonalities with Samson’s depictions of his city and its people. Reunion Tour took that propensity two steps further, featuring two songs inspired by—and named after—Hopper paintings. “Sun in an Empty Room” is a blithe farewell to the place you once called home. “Night Windows,” meanwhile, is its broodier, after-dark companion piece, instead mourning the place someone else used to live. This is strangely more emotive, with icy guitars weeping over the group-sung refrain: “But you’re not / Coming home again.”

11. “(Manifest)” (Reconstruction Site, 2003)
Reconstruction Site is organized around three “anchor” songs: “(Manifest),” “(Hospital Vespers),” and “(Paste-Due).” As Samson explains: “Those three songs are actually sonnets, and they’re all the same music—very simple, kind of hymn-like melody. So, I just had this idea of […] sign-posting the record with three sonnets that thematically elaborated on what the record is about.” Together, these vignettes tell the story of a loved one’s hospital stay and, eventually, their death. But the first—the album’s jaunty, samba-inspired opener “(Manifest)”—focuses on the gleeful feeling of sharing your life with the person you love. The lyrics are slightly cryptic, but they conclude with a straightforward couplet from which one could reasonably extrapolate an entire life philosophy. “I’m permitted one act I can save / I choose to sit here next to you and wave,” Samson grins before a triumphant blast of trumpet sends us skyward. Things are about to turn dark, the narrator seems to suggest, but we’re together now and that’s enough.

10. “Left and Leaving” (Left and Leaving, 2000)
The natural sequel to Fallow’s title track, “Left and Leaving” is the closest the Weakerthans come to a straight-away breakup song. There’s the imaginary competition of who’s moved on first: who’s left? Who’s leaving? There’s the way in which we map our emotions onto our surroundings: torn-down buildings, broken-glass-covered sidewalks. And there are the banal objects—blankets, matches, birthday cards—that become talismanic when they’re all that’s left. “I think the point is to recognize the details in your daily life and to recognize that they’re important,” Samson once said. “Hopefully it translates well and the songs make people look at their lives more closely.” Every subtle murmur of guitar feels equally purposeful, and a stillness hangs in the air. Loneliness never sounded so peaceful.

9. “Utilities” (Reunion Tour, 2007)
The Weakerthans’ ironically titled final album—not counting 2013’s Falcon Lake Incident, a collaboration with Jim Bryson—closes out with this jubilant waltz. From its initial burble of keyboards, the song sounds like a goodbye, but there’s an undertone of hope, confirmed by the elongated yawns of Carroll’s lap steel, like a sunset made of putty. Samson sings unguardedly of wanting to be useful, returning, as on “Left and Leaving,” to junk-drawer minutiae: “I just wish I were a toothbrush or a solder gun / Make me something somebody can use.” After a playful guitar solo—one of few played by Samson rather than Carroll—we’re left with a final, warbling organ chord. Although this may be the end, it feels as though everything is going to be okay.