Ontario musician Jonas Bonnetta got an unexpected call last summer. The Terry Fox Foundation needed music for a short film to mark the Marathon of Hope’s 45th anniversary in 2025. Its creative team had been bouncing around the idea of using a version of the Tragically Hip’s massively popular 1992 song Courage (for Hugh MacLennan), and they asked Bonnetta if he’d be interested in taking a crack at it.
Bonnetta runs a studio in Mountain Grove, Ont., an hour north of the Hip’s home base of Kingston, composing soundtracks and making his own music under the name Evening Hymns. He recorded a quick demo that week while travelling, then spent months back home honing dozens of versions until his was perfected.
Earlier this month, the Terry Fox Foundation unveiled its new Finish It campaign, hoping to build on Fox’s legacy and reach his goal of ending cancer through the work of the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network. The film features a digitally recreated Terry Fox coming to a stop on a highway, only to be joined by hundreds of others to complete the journey.
Bonnetta’s sparse, haunting rearrangement of Courage brings the voice of front man Gord Downie, who died of brain cancer in 2017, and the original backing vocals to the fore with minimal accompaniment. The surviving members of the Hip have signed off on this new version, and the Terry Fox Foundation says it’s exploring releasing a full-length recording.
Bonnetta spoke with The Globe and Mail by video call this week to discuss how the rearrangement came to be.
What did you hope to achieve with the song?
I’d recently seen the film Aftersun, and there’s a scene with the song Under Pressure where the composer Oliver Coates had reimagined the song in a way that wrecked me. I was like, maybe we can revoice Courage and reinvent the song. Then I got sent Gord’s isolated vocal.
I remember sitting at arrivals at Pearson airport, putting in my AirPods and listening to Gord’s voice, and being so wildly moved by it. It was magical to get my hands on it.
How did you put the rearrangement together?
All of the instrumentation on it, all the music, is me. The band ended up sending us Gord’s actual recording from the studio, and the backup vocals are baked into the original. You get to hear Gord’s voice in the room. No one gets to hear these things.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this song in my life, but to hear it isolated, you could imagine the size of the room that he’s in. There’s no reverb on it. You can hear the breathing, and his anticipation, and the excitement growing in his voice. I played my piano here and built my little sound world around it.
How do you feel about the final product?
I’m an engineer and producer, so I could have fussed away forever with it. A huge part was not to overcook it. Getting these ingredients to work with is a once-in-a-lifetime type thing. I cried working on it. All the people who trickled into the conversation about versions of it were quite moved by the combinations of all these elements. I knew that something was happening on an emotional level, and that was the key to it working.
This interview has been edited and condensed.