The Tragically Hip may be the pride of Kingston, Ontario, but it’s no exaggeration to say that the Canadian rock institution that many know and love today was actually born in New Orleans. Prior to recording their second full-length album, the Hip was Canada’s sweatiest, smokiest live band, and in 1990, they headed down to Daniel Lanois’ new, yet-to-be-named Kingsway Studio in the Big Easy to lay their latest batch of road-tested rave-ups onto tape with Tom Petty producer Don Smith. But during their time down south, the Hip started tricking out their signature Stones-schooled crunch with funk grooves, jazzy rhythms, hypnotic jams, and studio experimentation, while the group’s charismatic frontman Gord Downie continued to cultivate a lyrical voice that was as poetic as it was peculiar. “When we went in to make Road Apples, we had a lot more confidence as a band and as players, and we allowed ourselves to stretch out a bit,” guitarist Rob Baker tells Apple Music. “It felt like we were making real strides as a band.” When Road Apples was released in February 1991, several of the band’s proven crowd-pleasers—like their go-to set opener at the time, “Crack My Spine Like a Whip”—were absent from the final tracklist (and they would remain on the cutting-room floor until May 2021, when they were released as the Saskadelphia EP). That’s because Road Apples marked the moment when the Hip began to think of records less as a straight simulation of their live sets and more as an artistic medium unto themselves. While the album is home to some of the Hip’s toughest no-nonsense rockers (like the immortal opener, “Little Bones”), the band’s live-wire energy was matched by an equally fierce intellect. With Downie taking complete control of the lyric-writing for the first time, the Hip became the rare rock band that used bottle-smashing riffs as a gateway to examining political disputes in small Ontario cities (“Born in the Water”) and the mysterious deaths of iconic painters (“Three Pistols”). But if Road Apples foreshadowed Downie’s future role as a living, breathing Encyclopedia Canadiana, he also proved himself to be one of the country’s most vulnerable and affecting balladeers on the wistful “Long Time Running” and the devastating “Fiddler’s Green” (an acoustic elegy for his five-year-old nephew Charles Gillespie, who passed away from a congenital heart condition in 1989). “Road Apples takes me back to a really amazing time in the band, where the future was still very much uncertain,” Baker reflects. “We were really focused and sharp and on our game.” On the occasion of the record’s 30th anniversary—marked with a deluxe edition featuring an outtakes section dubbed Hoof-Hearted—Baker and drummer Johnny Fay take us track by track through the album that saw The Tragically Hip leave the Canadian bar circuit behind for good and take up permanent residency in the nation’s arenas. “Little Bones” Rob Baker: “'Little Bones' probably bumped 'Crack My Spine Like a Whip' off the record, because they're both super uptempo songs. We were in New Orleans and [bassist] Gord Sinclair had the riff on acoustic guitar, which wound up being on Hoof-Hearted, the extra record in the box set. It's a nice little delicate acoustic guitar piece, and Gord Downie just sang over top of it: ‘Eat that chicken slow/It's full of all those little bones.’ That was the little nugget that it grew from. When we were recording it, Don Smith would be sitting in his chair, and he'd pretend he was riding on a racehorse, because we'd come out of the gate flying.” Johnny Fay: “Don really dialed that one in. With me, specifically, he really tuned me to play a certain way that I was never able to play. It took a couple of hours to ramp me up. He was getting me to lift my arm like Charlie Watts when I hit the snare drum. I was never able to play it the same after that.” “Twist My Arm” RB: “'Twist My Arm' and 'Cordelia' both came from when Johnny and I set up in his parents' garage and jammed. We'd record everything on these little cassette tapes. I remember thinking, 'We need to get some songs in here,' so we jammed those two and developed them, and then when we presented them to the band, we had tempo changes, different sections, and it was like, 'Here it is!' And then everybody drops in and starts playing it like they already knew it.” “Cordelia” RB: “There was a song called 'Leatherman,' which was the basis of 'Cordelia,' and then there was 'Angst on the Planks,' which also ended up on Hoof-Hearted. And then we kind of melded those two songs into 'Cordelia.' We had it all together, but it was missing something. And I remember we were sitting backstage at Rockefellers in Houston, and I was playing my guitar, and I got that 'dah-dah-daahh-dun-dun-dun’ riff and I was like, 'That's the one!' It was those two bars that just tied it up.” JF: “Neil Peart loved the lyrics for 'Cordelia.' He came to see us play at Massey Hall [in Toronto], which is where [Rush's 1976 live album] All the World's a Stage was recorded. It was surreal to have him there. He loved Gord, and Gord loved him, and I remember hearing Neil ask him about the lyrics of 'Cordelia,' which I thought was really cool.” “The Luxury” RB: “From the very beginning of the band, we had all these loose, jazzy jams. That was something that we were into. And the lyrics are clearly drawn from all that time on the road. Lots of songs from those early records were inspired by road signs or places we passed.” “Born in the Water” RB: “It's kind of a lost art, but I was really into boogie rock from the '70s, and I just wanted to write some boogie-rock guitar riff. The song that made me want to get serious about playing guitar—and it's not even that great a song—was 'Dance Little Sister' by the Stones. Keith [Richards] is playing this big, chunky riff the whole time, but in the background, mixed way back, Mick Taylor is soloing the whole time around the chord, just boogieing back there. I loved that!” “Long Time Running” RB: “Gord Sinclair came in with the riff. It's one of those ones where he showed it to us, and I think probably by the second or third time through, it was pretty much the way we played it. Did we know that this song would really connect with people? Not really. But it connected with us.” “Bring It All Back” JF: “Gord Sinclair and I played just the bed track with a guide guitar. But [guitarist] Paul Langlois saved it—he did an upstroke on the five, not on the four. One of us had counted it wrong, and it's one of those unique, happy little accidents that’s just amazing.” “Three Pistols” RB: “I remember working it up in a cottage on Wolfe Island [near Kingston]. And then we took it out and we played it and it was like, 'This is good—it really works live.' But there was just something about the riff that just didn't sit quite right—it was originally three chords instead of four. So the only thing that changed was the guitar part—I think the lyrics were already set.” “Fight” RB: “'Fight,' 'Ouch,' and 'Montreal' all came from the same writing day at my parents' house. We set up in the dining room, which we only ever did once—and we got three tunes out of it. But I remember playing 'Fight' a ridiculous number of times in the studio. And you can get into a situation where it's like, 'I've played this solo too many times,' and then you start to change it up, and it's like, 'I'm not getting any closer, I'm getting further away.'” “On the Verge” RB: “'Crack My Spine' was designed to open a show and 'On the Verge' was designed to close the show, because we could just keep speeding it up and speeding it up until it just exploded into noise.” “Fiddler’s Green” RB: “This was a very emotional experience. I think we all had a sense of the gravity of what the song meant. And I think we probably all thought, 'We may not play this song live, and that's okay.'” JF: “These last two songs—‘Fiddler’s’ and ‘Unplucked Gems’—I remember the recording of them better than I do the rest of the record. Recording ‘Fiddler’s’ was really heavy because [guest accordionist] Malcolm Burn came in, and his girlfriend had just had a daughter, and he ended up playing on it that night.” “The Last of the Unplucked Gems” RB: “This was a jam that came up in the rehearsal space that we had in New Orleans in the 9th Ward. Before we started the record, we went into this wooden warehouse for a couple of days to get acclimatized, and it was probably about 105 degrees in there. We got 'Little Bones' and 'Last of the Unplucked Gems' out of that. We played it and played it, and Gord would have different couplets and he'd rearrange them differently. In the end, Don and [mixer] Bruce [Barris] cut a version together. On the take that we did, the 15-minute roll of two-inch tape ran off the reel, and we said, 'Oh, that's a great effect—can you put that on the record?' And they said, 'Well, it actually doesn't record the sound that way.' So they recorded the sound of a two-inch tape going off the reel and then spliced that onto the end, just to convey the idea: It's over.”