commentary

Riding the Canadian: A Musical Journey Across Canada

July 1, 2026

For Canada Day 🍁, I’m excited to share my song “Riding the Canadian,” an epic adventure(!) about travelling across the country on VIA Rail’s legendary train, The Canadian. Available on all streaming platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify and YouTube Music.

Back in 2020, I was booked by VIA Rail Canada to do an Artist on Board tour from Toronto to Vancouver before everything was brought to a halt by the pandemic. While preparing for that tour, I wrote this song to serenade passengers on board — a kind of musical travelogue for a journey across the country.

The writing process started with the VIA Rail website of The Canadian route and then used a more detailed route guide. I worked my way through the stops along the line and tried to connect different places with interesting pieces of Canadian history and culture. It was an ambitious writing challenge: to create a song that could cover that kind of distance, geographically and culturally, while working within the constraints of a folk pop structure. In the end, I am really happy with how it turned out.

Listen for references to famous hockey players, musicians and bands, cultural and historical moments, and a little bit of history about The Canadian itself. It’s both a shout-out to the journey and a tribute to Canada, wrapped into one.

For those who are curious, the original demo is available on Bandcamp. This new release is part of my Selkirk Range Songbook series, featuring songs I wrote and demoed over the years, now newly produced as part of my Sunophonic Sessions.

And just for fun, there’s also an unreleased hip-hop version of the song you can listen to here.

Enjoy — and vive le Canada! 🇨🇦🚞🎸🏒✨

🛣️ Queen E ⛰️

September 12, 2025

Ever been on a winter road trip where the landscape is the soundtrack? That’s ‘Queen E’ — written with that Alberta highway in mind. Heading south out of Calgary, the Rockies sit to the west in the distance, growing closer as you drive toward the U.S. border.

Fort Macleod is on the map, Ian Tyson and Corb Lund country, with four strong winds carrying the sounds of open prairie. It’s Canadiana: endless highway, where ‘the blacktop meets the blue’ horizon, and with mountains rising like a castle of stone.

Near De Winton, Highway 2A splits to the southwest, connecting Calgary to Okotoks.
Alberta Highway 2 – exit 222 by Marek Ślusarczyk 

🎧 Listen, like, and share Queen E on Spotify, Apple Music or your favourite streaming platform.

✨ This Might Be Love ✨

August 28, 2025

One of the songs closest to my heart from the Hired Gun album is ‘This Might Be Love‘. To give you a glimpse into the process, I’m sharing an image of the handwritten lyrics—the very first draft where the song took shape back in July 2017.

You’ll notice a little star sticker on the page—that’s my own reward system. Whenever I finish writing a song, I give myself a star. It’s a small ritual, but it makes the creative process feel like a celebration. 🌟

It’s a reminder that every track starts as words on a page before it grows into music.

I’d love for you to check it out—listen, like, and share This Might Be Love on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you stream your music. Every click and share helps bring these songs to more ears. 🎶

Introducing the Sunophonic Sessions

August 10, 2025

I’m excited (and, truthfully, a little nervous) to share a new chapter in the Selkirk Range project: The Sunophonic Sessions.

This collection of songs is built around something I hold sacred—words. Every lyric in this forthcoming collection of songs is my own, written by hand over many months and years. That part of the music—the storytelling, the voice behind the voice—is something I feel strongly about preserving. These are my stories, my images, my turns of phrase.

What’s new is how they’ve been brought to life in musical form.

The arrangements and performances you’ll hear weren’t created in a traditional studio. They were rendered using Suno.ai, a generative music platform that transforms lyrical and stylistic prompts into fully realized musical performances. At first, I was unsure—skeptical, even. I wondered whether it could really feel anything like music made with people in a room.

But what surprised me was just how responsive it is. Suno can infer mood, phrasing, and even expression in ways I didn’t expect. The platform—still early in its evolution—has a remarkable knack for giving voice and shape to a song. Quite frankly, it’s been a thrill to hear these words set to music like this.

Over the past decade, I’d written some two dozen songs that have been sitting in a collection of notebooks and pre-production demo recordings. As I began shaping them with Suno, they seemed to naturally split into two distinct sounds: one leaning into country traditions, the other into more adult-oriented folk-pop. The result is the Sunophonic Sessions, which will be released across a single and two albums:

  • The Ballad of the Titan is available on Bandcamp now and will be released on the other streaming platforms soon. It’s a slightly quirky take on the ill-fated OceanGate submersible, playing on the connection between the words Titan, Titanic, and Atlantic. You can read more about it in my earlier post.
  • Hired Gun, arriving on August 22 has something of a classic country feel, pairing plainspoken storytelling with easygoing melodies. I brought in Colin Noel from Electric Treehouse studio to add final polish to the mixes and mastering of this collection.
  • Duty. Courage. Truth. will follow later this year, exploring an adult contemporary sound with folk-rock at its core. Textured arrangements and reflective themes move across a range of moods, from intimate to anthemic. You can hear a pre-release version now on Bandcamp — and while you’re there, follow Selkirk Range to get updates and be the first to know when the album drops.

Above all, the greatest reward for a songwriter is finding an audience who feels the words and emotions you’ve poured into a song. In that sense, how the music was produced matters far less than whether it connects. Hearing these songs come back polished and expressive has been like hearing them for the first time — a mind-blowing experience for a songwriter working with limited resources. The tools may have changed, yet the intent remains the same: to create songs that are meaningful, and to offer them with the hope they’ll find a home in someone’s heart.

Thanks for listening.

– Gordon (Selkirk Range)

Look out for the first releases from Hired Gun and Duty Courage Truth coming soon.

Sneak preview from the forthcoming album

December 21, 2022

The new album is coming soon. I’ve been working with Colin Noel at Electric Treehouse in Edmonton on a collection of 10 tracks that will be available on the streaming services in the new year.

In the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of a newly recorded version of “Wear Anything!”

This song was written several years ago for a songwriting workshop and has since become a favourite when I perform live. It’s all about different kinds of hats, which of course, are all about personality.

Coming up with a rhyming list of hats and making it work musically is the kind of creative challenge that I love taking on! For the longest time, I didn’t have a third verse for this song … but thank goodness for the Internet!

This version is now a duet featuring the incredible vocal talents of Taene Nomaowen, who joined me on a couple other tracks on the album.

I also added a new arrangement to it, while opening with a baritone ukulele made by Twisted Wood Guitars based in St. Albert near Edmonton (a very thoughtful gift from my wife).

What kind of hat are you gonna wear?

Congrats to The Orchard on its growing collection of awards

December 20, 2022

In a previous post, I mentioned that my song “Broken Horse” made it into the motion picture soundtrack for The Orchard.

Now, I’m delighted to share that the film has a growing collection of honours and is getting noticed! Congrats to Mark and Kerry, as well as the cast and crew.

Blue Skies of Summer

July 23, 2017

There is nothing quite like playing an outdoor show on a beautiful summer afternoon.  This was taken at the Beats N’ Eats Festival at Baturyn Park in north Edmonton a couple weeks ago.

SR at Beats_Eats_July 2017 cropped

Closing in on a release date

October 9, 2016

Final mixes are done and we are sending the tracks to be mastered at Golden Mastering in California in the coming week.

From there, we will send master tracks for replication on a small run of CDs, as well as uploading to CD Baby for distribution to various online retailers, including iTunes.

It will be a soft launch of the record in November, meaning that I will release some or all of the album but plan for a more formal release event in the coming months.

Everett’s been wonderful to work with throughout this process, and I’m very pleased with the results so far; and especially for the opportunity to work with some talented musicians who performed on the record.

Stay tuned for more soon.

 

SAC 2016 SONGWRITING CHALLENGE WEEK 4

July 31, 2016

I’m late submitting this week but I met the challenge.  This week we were asked by Toronto-based singer-songwriter Emma-Lee to “tie two tunes together” by marrying parts from different unfinished songs into a new composition.

This was a hard challenge in part because I have many unfinished ideas but trying to bring them together in a new arrangement is surprisingly difficult.  Different rhythms, different keys, different moods, etc.  After sifting through my iPhone scratch recordings for some time, I finally decided to merge a melody from one fragment of an idea with a guitar riff from another.

The chorus was part of the guitar riff idea and the melody came from a very different song idea so I essentially had to write the lyrics from scratch.  The chorus is suggestive of a theme but I had to work out an angle on it.  In this case the lyrics aren’t too specific but lend themselves to a relationship-type song.  I decided I also wanted to keep it simple and short, so I opted for two verses with a short bridge, bringing the whole thing in under 3 minutes.

It’s a bit more pop than what I’ve been writing lately and the production is more than I would usually do for this kind of demo but I had fun with it, and that’s what matters

We’ve Both Been There

I know that love can be confusing-
when it undermines those plans you made
But I also know it bears repeating-
you’ve got two choices when you’re scared

We’ve both been there
We’ve both been there

I know frustration likes to hang around-
ticking like a time bomb that you wear
Before it blows you need to recognize-
there are others out there who still care

We’ve both been there
We’ve both been there

And I won’t tell you no lies-
cause I can see in those eyes
we’ve both been there

We’ve both been there

Words and music by Gordon Gow, Copyright 2016
Featured Image by Holly Jay flic.kr/p/sjJRJA

 

SAC 2016 SONGWRITING CHALLENGE WEEK 3

July 24, 2016

This week’s challenge from Michael Perlmutter from Instinct Entertainment was to do a co-write with another participant.  The subject of the song was to be about “relationships” and the process was intended to allow us to be able to share our own experience “with a co-writer may help to craft the story and share the feeling in a more profound way.”

Collaboration presents many challenges unto itself; not the least of which is finding a time  and place to do it.  Online connections are good but face to face is probably better for me, and unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen this week because of other commitments.  However, I did manage to contact two Edmonton-based writers, BoneDog Dixon and Shauna Specht, both of whom I met through the SAC Edmonton Regional Writers Group.

My approach going into the challenge was to lend what I feel are my strengths in lyric writing to the collaboration.  Given the time constraints I also felt it better to draw on some material that was already somewhat developed rather than trying to create from scratch.

I write lyrics in tandem with music, using it as a kind of scaffolding for the process.  The scaffolding can then be pulled back to reveal a lyric.  That was the case with both of these songs.

I offered to send BoneDog a lyric with the title “That Love Ain’t True”, which is about the kind of relationships that really aren’t honest or healthy.   I felt that it fit with his blues-influenced approach to songwriting.  Originally it was written with a series of short verses followed by a refrain.  BoneDog suggested I expand the verses and he added some additional elements to the lyric.  His musical approach is really interesting, and very different from what I would have imagined for the song.  I like it, and think that if we were to continue working on it that I’d want to do an overhaul of the verses to give it a stronger coherence internally and possibly inject some dark humour into it.

I offered Shauna a lyric with the title “Save it for the Brokenhearted”, which is about a long term relationship that has come to an end;  however, it’s not a sad ending but rather two lovers who have reconciled with themselves about it and realize it’s time to move on.   Shauna was drawn to the theme but decided to take it in quite a different direction than the original lyric.  She retained some of the thematic elements and a few lines but it is also a completely different song after the co-write.  I’m impressed with what she’s done with it in such a short time span and now have a greater sense of how an idea in a co-write can develop in unexpected directions.  If we had more time to work on it together I’d probably press for a different chorus as part of the co-writing process.  Nonetheless, my compliments to her for this song, which is now called “The Book of You and Me”

Overall, it was a great experience this week and it’s encouraged me to start thinking more seriously about the possibilities of doing more co-write experiments.