Originally released February 15, 1991
Reissued November 26, 2021
Universal
1xLP
In their nearly three decade run The Tragically Hip took on the reputation as ‘Canada’s band,' a reputation that has only grown since the passing of singer Gord Downie in 2017 and their subsequent disbandment. This partially came from the group’s relative lack of commercial success elsewhere, but more importantly from the incredible amount of Canadian-ness in their music. Case in point is the album’s title which came up as a replacement for the rejected working title Saskadelphia, which the label kiboshed because they feared no one would get the reference to Saskatchewan. The band instead went with a rural-Canadian slang term for horse manure, a reference that was also lost on the label executives. Road Apples’s lyric sheet is littered with Canadiana like the Meech Lake Accord, Tom Thomson, caribou and much more. While The Hip wrote about much more than just the country they were from, it’s impossible to separate this music from the place it was made in and 30 years on stands as an enduring classic of Canadian music.