‘He was a great man’: Bob Rock on Gord Downie and ‘Lustre Parfait,’ their ‘happy accident’ album

It turns out that late Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie had at least one more album in him.

But there’s a difference between “Lustre Parfait,” the brilliant work he recorded with Payola$ co-founder and über-producer Bob Rock that’s out Friday and recent releases “Away Is Mine,” “Introduce Yerself” and “Secret Path”: Downie, who died in 2017 from glioblastoma at 53, started this one on a lark.

“It’s a happy accident,” Rock said late last week from his studio in Maui, Hawaii. “This is really just two guys that are friends making music that we love with all our influences.”

The camaraderie between the two was sparked after the Hip, 10 albums deep into a career that spawned three million-selling albums — and still the only act, Canadian or otherwise, to achieve that sales summit domestically — hired Rock to produce “World Container” in 2006 and its followup, “We Are the Same.”

During the sessions, Rock and Downie bonded over their love of hockey and family. (“We talked about Bobby Orr a lot because he was a huge Boston fan and I was a Bobby Orr fan, but we’d laugh because of the Canucks and Boston. I’m a Canucks fan, so there you go,” said Rock.) When it came time to wrap, Downie posed a question to Rock.

“He said, ‘Do you have any music? Can you send me some music?’” recalled Rock, who has helped sell more than 60 millions albums producing everyone from Metallica and Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams and the Offspring.

“So I sent him a few things and they came back songs, and I thought, ‘Well this is cool.’ And he wrote 14 songs to the tracks that I had written and put together.”

Rock explained that when he isn’t producing, he’s composing, which was the reason he had stockpiled so many instrumentals.

“That’s what I do. That’s just my passion. I guess, in a funny way, the studio is an instrument to me.”

“Lustre Parfait” was then recorded in piecemeal fashion: when Downie wasn’t working with the Hip, he and Rock would “grab a weekend, or two or three days,” either in Toronto, L.A. or Vancouver, “till we finally got it finished.”

While there was little doubt the 62-minute work would be released as an album, there was no timeline for its release, nor much attention paid to the promotion and publicity that usually follows such a project’s completion.

Even the video for the single “Greyboy Says” — which showcases a live performance featuring Rock on guitar accompanied by Offspring members Dexter Holland and Noodles, ace drummer Abraham Laboriel Jr. and Jamey Koch — contains sparse visuals of Downie in a vocal booth and behind the control board due to the impromptu nature of their gatherings.

“This was so nonchalant that there is no video and barely any pictures of us together, because we weren’t even thinking about that,” Rock said. “We were just thinking about the music.”

Downie’s terminal cancer diagnosis became a reality during the latter stages of recording “Lustre Parfait.”

“His recording was done months before and, when he got sick, I looked to finish it so he would hear it,” Rock recalled. “So he kind of heard the finished product, but when he passed away I really couldn’t listen to it, to be quite honest, for a long time.”

At the recent behest of Tragically Hip manager Jake Gold and the Arts & Crafts record label — and honouring a pledge he made to Downie — Rock put aside his grief to finish “Lustre Parfait.”

“Basically Gord made me promise that everybody should hear this,” said Rock. “Looking at it I realized that the most important thing was Gord’s vocals and his lyrics, so I finished the album because I had a new perspective.

“I never had a chance to mix it and finish it properly. I actually took a couple weeks and it was really great finishing it, and I fulfilled my promise. So far, people seem to like it.”

As they should: “Lustre Parfait” is a stunning, thrill ride of an album that features Downie at his rocking, passionate best and Rock sculpting the perfect musical foundations around his lyrically cryptic musings. The addition of Adam Greenholtz’s keyboards offers a sonically diverse palette on which barn burners like “The Raven and the Red-Tailed Hawk” and the horn-spiced title track can rattle with adrenalin, but also adds gravitas to the moodier “The Moment Is a Wild Place.”

There’s even a pseudo-reggae-fuelled track called “Safest Day of the Year” that hearkens back to Rock’s Payola$ roots, underscoring the album’s spontaneous feel.

“There was a certain amount of freedom because there was no path to the project,” Rock said. “And unfortunately, there’s no future, which is a drag — we really enjoyed it and we had plans to continue when the timing was right. We had a lot of fun.”

Rock described Downie’s writing approach as similar to his initial partnership with Payola$ co-founder Paul Hyde: one that yielded such late ’70s and early ’80s hits as “China Boys,” “Eyes of a Stranger” and “Hammer on a Drum.”

For “Safest Day of the Year,” for example, Downie improvised lyrics like “The night sky’s a rye and Pepsi” and “Afternoon’s white as smoke/And zebra-wound-red, and worn-out-tradition yellow.”

“It’s almost like poetry in a way … the verses,” Rock said. “The (musicians) just had the groove and he just started free-forming all the lyrics. He just liked the way it sounded and he was really happy with that.”

Although Downie typically kept most of the meanings of his lyrics private, the singer did ask Rock about an instrumental he had given him entitled “Camaro.”

“The title came from my wife Angie’s favourite car,” Rock recalled. “He came back with the lyrics and if you listen to the lyrics they’re absolutely brilliant … I don’t know how you can work the word ‘Camaro’ into a song, but he found a way.

“All of these songs have amazing stories and his perspective on everything is so great.”

The duo had so much fun assembling “Lustre Parfait” that Rock said Downie also wrote a screenplay based on the album — although it’s unknown whether the film will ever be produced.

They also toyed with the idea of performing the occasional show upon its release, before Downie’s deteriorating health made it an impossibility. Rock said he might be open to performing a show or two with guest vocalists.

“Gord and I thought about it (performing),” Rock said. “We thought, well, we’re not going to tour, but we thought it would be great to do a show in Toronto or Montreal, the major cities … maybe in art galleries.

“When you hear it, you feel it should be played, because it sounds lively; there’s a feel to it. We’ll see how it plays out. I’m just glad it’s out at this point.”

Rock, who has been in the studio again with the Offspring and Mötley Crüe, said he’s extremely proud of “Lustre Parfait.”

“It was a long journey and it was great that I fulfilled a promise to Gord,” said Rock.

“He was a great man. I care for him dearly and I miss him.”

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