Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “YYZ”
Album:Moving Pictures
Year: 1981
Artist: Rush was formed in Toronto in 1968. It has been made up primarily of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Hits include "Tom Sawyer," "The Spirit of Radio," and "2112."
Rush is one of the most popular Canadian artists of all time. But Rush never sang about Canada.* Explicitly, anyway.
But there’s an instrumental song on Rush’s best-selling album, 1981’s Moving Pictures, with a title instantly familiar to anyone who has ever flown into or out of Canada’s largest airport: “YYZ.” It’s named after Toronto’s international-airport code, which can be spotted on every airline ticket and baggage tag that passes through Toronto Pearson Airport. And it should be Ontario’s provincial anthem.
The members of Rush say the song was a tribute to the warm feeling they got whenever they came home after touring the world. And Toronto was home: bassist/singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson grew up there, and drummer Neil Peart came from down the QEW in St. Catharines (where, to be fair, he was more likely to fly out of Buffalo).
Rush promotional image with Lee, Peart, and Lifeson, ca. 1970s. (PolyGram - eBay archive/Wikimedia)
Rush was and is a Toronto band. Despite Rush’s international success, they never moved away. And, yes, that probably is Lee you see sitting behind home plate at a Blue Jays game, because he’s had season tickets there for decades. (He’s such a fixture that, when the Jays held games in Buffalo during pandemic lockdowns because of cross-border travel restrictions, they put a cardboard cut-out of Lee in his usual spot.)
You don’t have to be from Toronto to love “YYZ,” though. “YYZ” is a passport to the world for most Ontarians (and many Canadians), and it’s a warm hug on your return. Toronto also takes in more than twice as many immigrants as either Montreal or Vancouver: for many new Ontarians, the letters YYZ are a first impression of Canada.
It’s also a perverse joke: three characters consisting of the alphabet’s last two letters, the crippling Canadian-insecurity complex incarnate. It doesn’t help that Canadians are always correcting others on the proper pronunciation of “Z” — because, you know, we’re different.
“YYZ” sounds like the last place in the world you’d ever want to go. But Rush made “YYZ” a place you want to be. (And, no, that doesn’t rhyme.)
So why should it be named the province’s most iconic song?
Well, for starters, it opens with what could be a school bell, followed by a mad dash from locker to classroom. It’s also educational: its opening fanfare is in 10/8, imitating the Morse-code pattern for the letters YYZ. Pay attention in math, kids. Peart clearly did.
As the melody dips and dives like a car navigating traffic on Highway 401 (though likely not in the GTA during rush hour), there’s a bumpy beat that feels like hiking in the Canadian Shield.
Each verse takes a different rhythmic approach: first, the melody is introduced in unison, then the guitar and bass diverge, then it slips into a danceable off-beat that’s almost ska or disco, shifting every four bars just in case you get comfortable.
Then they take solo turns after each phrase. Then there’s a lurching guitar solo, inexplicably punctuated by the sound of shattering glass, that’s as exciting and twisty as dodging Ottawa River whitewater obstacles in a kayak that could flip at any second.
Then, as relief, there’s a halftime, synthy, new-wave bridge that climbs skyward, buoyed by synths, through sun-split clouds, wheeling and soaring. It evokes the original IMAX movie, North of Superior, that used to play at the Cinesphere. (IMAX is an Ontario invention, by the way.) “YYZ” does, in the words of Royal Canadian Air Force pilot/poet John McGee, “a hundred things you have not dreamed of.”
Rush: "YYZ" live (Rio)
Each shift sounds entirely natural. Room is made for each new development, much as the province’s vast geography makes space for its diverse ethnic and linguistic makeup. What does Kenora have in common with Windsor or Ottawa? Not much, but they’re all part of one larger whole.
Finally, in case things feel too weird, Rush return to the relatively straightforward form of the first verse. The song then concludes with a cascading drum fill and a slight nod to the opening fanfare. Aaaaaaaand: scene. Welcome home.
Jonathan Challoner is a New York City–based trumpeter who co-founded the Heavyweights Brass Band at Toronto’s Humber College in 2009, inspired by the Shuffle Demons and others. They started out covering pop hits by Justin Bieber and Beyoncé. But when it came time to put out their second album, 2014’s Brasstronomical, Challoner says he was looking for material that would set his brass band apart from all the others — material that would also identify them as a Toronto band.
What better song than “YYZ?” Challoner wrote an arrangement adapting the rock trio’s song for two trumpets, trombone, tenor saxophone, sousaphone (tuba), and drums. One of a number of considerations: he had to ensure that tuba player Rob Teehan could play Lee’s ridiculous bass parts. He could. “It worked strangely well,” says the trumpeter. “The actual chord structure is not that complicated; it’s just what Rush do with it.”
The Heavyweights Brass Band - YYZ [Official Audio]
Fellow trumpet player Chris Butcher was skeptical. “I wasn’t open-minded about it,” he told Earshot magazine at the time. “It is by far the most difficult tune we’ve ever played with all the mixed meters and the virtuosic lines.” But he was eventually won over by the song’s underlying message. “Everybody in the group is from across the country,” said Butcher. “All our roads led to Toronto and we are so grateful to be in this city.”
Not a lot of bands cover Rush — for obvious reasons. It’s difficult. The band is idiosyncratic. So why would a crowd-pleasing busker band cover “YYZ,” a song that was never a single and is rarely (if ever) on the radio? “As a mid-tier fan, it was a song that I knew,” says Challoner. “It’s a tribute to the creativity of that band. The song reinvents itself as it goes along. It puts so much on the plate. It’s fun and engaging because it goes in so many directions you’re never sure where it’s going next. Improvisation is woven into the composition in a way that’s constantly surprising and pushing boundaries.”
“YYZ” is not such a deep cut that it’s obscure — it is, after all, on the same side of vinyl as “Tom Sawyer” and appears on a whopping four live albums. “We probably played it to a few blank stares,” admits Challoner. “But when people did get it, there was always this look of, ‘Whaaa?!’ We won over a lot of people with this one. When it hits, it hits.”
Geddy Lee, Neil Peart, and Alex Lifeson (left to right) pose before the start of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards gala at the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa, on May 5, 2012. (Fred Chartrand/CP)
As a candidate for a provincial anthem, “YYZ” also works precisely because it’s an instrumental. No one needs to know the words, because no one’s going to sing it. Words are loaded vessels. We keep changing the words to “O Canada” anyway, and we have for decades upon decades, despite what some “traditionalists” will tell you.
“YYZ” doesn’t dictate meaning: it allows you to bring whatever you want to it in whatever language or dialect you want. But, hopefully, it will make you want to pump your fist in the air with pride alongside your fellow citizens of every stripe.
“Living in New York, I’ve grown to admire the ways Canadians show their patriotism,” says Challoner. “They rarely do it in an obvious way. They’ll do it like this: write this crazy song about coming back to your home airport after being on tour. Canadians take a lot of pride in the quirkier side of our patriotism.
* “Lakeside Park” is about Victoria Day weekend at a place in St. Catharines near where drummer Neil Peart grew up — but that name is generic enough that it could be anywhere. “The Spirit of Radio” borrows its title from Toronto radio station CFNY’s early slogan, a piece of trivia lost to the sands of time. And there’s a section of the instrumental song “La Villa Strangiato” named “Danforth and Pape,” after a Toronto intersection. All that information is for super-nerds only — which, to be fair, make up a not-insignificant portion of Rush’s audience.
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