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38 Years Old

Field	Value
name	38 Years Old
cover	The Hip - 38 Years Old single cover.jpg
type	single
artist	The Tragically Hip
album	Up to Here
released	April 1990
studio	Ardent (Memphis, Tennessee)
genre	Folk rock
length	4:18
label	MCA
writer
producer	Don Smith
prev_title	Boots or Hearts
prev_year	1990
next_title	Little Bones
next_year	1991

"38 Years Old" is a song by Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip. It was released in April 1990 as the fourth single from the band's first full-length studio album, Up to Here. The song peaked at No. 41 on the Canadian RPM singles chart.

Content

The song is a fictional account of the real-life escape of 14 inmates from Millhaven Institution near the band's hometown of Kingston, Ontario, on July 10, 1972. The date of the event and the number of escapees mentioned in the song are historically incorrect ("12 men broke loose in '73...").

Lyrically, the song is written from the perspective of the younger brother of one of the escapees, a man who murdered the man who raped their sister.

Background

The song was written in Memphis during their recording of Up to Here. The main riff was written and performed by bassist Gord Sinclair on an acoustic guitar whose B and high E strings were detuned by a whole step. Guitarist Paul Langlois played bass on the recording.

Though it is one of The Tragically Hip's most popular songs, the band seldom played the song live. In Michael Barclay's 2018 book The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, the band's reticence to play the song live is attributed to a misperception among some of the band's fans that the song was autobiographical: because its emotional climax hinges on the moment when the narrator opens the window for "my older brother Mike", some fans have erroneously assumed that Gord Downie's real brother, documentary filmmaker Mike Downie, was himself a prisoner and one of the escapees from Millhaven.

Charts

Chart (1990)	Peak
position
Canadian RPM Singles Chart	41

References

"Top Singles - Volume 52, No. 2, May 26, 1990".
The Montreal Gazette. (1972-07-12). "Escaped convicts thought contained in 10-mile square".
The Montreal Gazette. (1972-07-17). "Search area expanded for Millhaven cons".
(2024). "Looking For A Place To Happen".
Michael Barclay, ''The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip''. [[ECW Press]], 2018. {{ISBN. 9781770414365. p. 66.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1989-songs 1990-singles the-tragically-hip-songs mca-records-singles songs-based-on-canadian-history songs-about-prison fiction-about-prison-escapes ontario-in-fiction fiction-set-in-1973 songs-written-by-rob-baker-(guitarist) songs-written-by-gord-downie

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