Blue Rodeo celebrates its 40th anniversary with a Canadian tour that starts this fall and stretches into 2026.Blue Rodeo: Lost Together/Supplied
In the early 1990s, Blue Rodeo played a ribfest in suburban Detroit. A small canal separated the band from its audience, but it might as well have been an ocean. When boats passed between, the musicians were hidden from fans who could not hear the music. The brisket was a hit. Blue Rodeo? Pass the coleslaw, please.
What happened to the 2025 song of summer?
Greg Keelor, the band’s co-founder with fellow singer-songwriter Jim Cuddy, has described the show as one of the band’s most “pathetic” gigs ever. “It seemed so useless,” he said in last year’s big-hearted documentary Blue Rodeo: Lost Together. “We were sick of it.”
What the band was sick of was trying to break into the U.S. market. It wasn’t happening for them. Out of his despondency, Keelor came up with a chorus for a possible song about brotherhood and community. When he played it on the tour bus, the band thought it was too sentimental. (They weren’t necessarily wrong.)
The song is Lost Together, from the 1992 album of the same name. The idea was that if the young group was going nowhere at the time, at least they had each other and their Canadian fans: “If we’re lost, then we are lost together.”
Keelor has since called it a campfire classic. I’m not sure that’s accurate, unless one considers a 16,000-capacity concrete amphitheatre in Canada’s most populated city a campfire.
Some do.
Blue Rodeo: Lost Together, a documentary released last year, chronicles the band's rise to fame.Blue Rodeo: Lost Together/Supplied
On Aug. 23, Blue Rodeo will play Toronto’s Budweiser Stage in an annual summer gathering of the Lost Together tribe. It will be the 25th time they’ve played the venue. If tradition holds, the concert will close with a singalong version of the song.
Strange and beautiful are the stars tonight
That dance around your head
In your eyes I see that perfect world
I hope that doesn’t sound too weird
Isn’t that just so Canadian? Keelor wrote one of the country’s most iconic pop songs and he’s apologizing for sounding “too weird” while singing it.
He spoke about the line “In your eyes I see that perfect world” in the Dale Heslip-directed documentary: “When we’re playing, the first couple of songs every night I feel a sort of wave of love. And a large part of that energy is the reflection of the audience.”
On Aug. 23, Blue Rodeo will play their annual show at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage for the 25th time.Blue Rodeo: Lost Together/Supplied
Blue Rodeo often opens its concerts with 5 Days in May. It is the first track off the 1993 album Five Days in July, described in the book Have Not Been the Same: The Canrock Renaissance, 1985-1995 as “as essential to a Canadian cottage weekend as a warm sweater and a case of beer.”
Speaking of which, Blue Rodeo recently affiliated itself with Toronto’s Mill Street Brewery for a limited-edition lager that is “brewed to celebrate music, craft and Canadian summer,” according to the press release. (One must ask: Why not call it Brew Rodeo?)
It’s a CanCon rock thing, beer. Rush has its signature brew, Henderson Brewing Company’s Rush Canadian Golden Ale. Calgary’s Big Rock Brewery has its Tragically Hip tribute Lake Fever Lager, which might be the worst-named beverage since Typhoid Iced Tea.
It is beyond me why someone hasn’t come up with a Joni Mitchell-themed beer named after a popular second-person pronoun. Nothing beats A Case of You on a hot day.
A photograph of Cuddy and Keelor and producers working on their song Diamond Mine.Blue Rodeo: Lost Together/Supplied
There has been a collective wringing of hands over the lack of a so-called Song of the Summer this year. The kids are missing that big, vibey, hot-weather hit that will inspire nostalgia 20 years down the road.
Get used to it. Streaming has killed the radio star, and the pop-music monoculture along with it.
Radio used to be the kingmaker when it came to hit songs, but there were exceptions. When Blue Rodeo released the single Try in June of 1987, commercial radio’s collective response was “try again.” It was a dud until MuchMusic put the song’s video into heavy rotation.
Cuddy and Keelor play their guitar and sing in a still from Blue Rodeo: Lost Together.Blue Rodeo: Lost Together/Supplied
Blue Rodeo outlasted MuchMusic − and trends, contemporaries and, I bet, that Motor City ribfest. The band celebrates its 40th anniversary with a Canadian tour that starts this fall and stretches into 2026.
But before that, there is the annual August appearance in their hometown. Cuddy will croon “But I know my past, you were there” on 5 Days in May and Keelor will sing “In the silence of this whispered night, I listen only to your breath” on Lost Together. Both hits are part of the band’s new EP Cottage Days.
Canadians have their songs of summer, perennially, from Blue Rodeo. I hope that doesn’t sound too weird.