How the Constantines shone a light on a world of possibilities beyond my quiet Yukon life

Whitehorse was small and quiet; rush hour lasted for 20 minutes on a bad day. All the streets had names, but there was no reason to know or understand them. I only knew the big three: Main Street, 4th and 2nd Ave. The others were minor distractions and superfluous details.

Whitehorse is a city, like so many small cities, of physical markers and old memories working as travel markers. Where the liquor store used to be, by the old four-way stop, in the parking lot where the old SAAN store was before it caught fire. That's how we got around in the many hours that were not rushed, landmarks guiding the way. 

We had three CD stores when I was growing up — Eric's Audiotronic in the Hougen Centre, the mall on Main Street named for the family who owned half of downtown; Big K Music in the Qwanlin Mall on the corner of 4th Ave across from the old Canadian Tire; and, across the road from that, my personal favourite: Deja Vú Music.

Deja Vú sold used CDs and music magazines that weren't SPIN and Rolling Stone, and they had copies of the legendary free alt-weekly Exclaim! by the door. The rare spot in town where culture could find its counter. 

The other stores sold music as a commodity — top 40 of the moment and full albums by bands whose songs you heard on the radio waiting in line at the post office. But Deja Vú was like a record store from a movie about any city other than the one I found myself in, with a burnout kid working behind the counter who, despite his lackadaisical exterior, holds deep judgment in every decision he rings through the till. 

Love is something that exists in all languages, an emotion that runs deep and wide like a river, leaving a lasting remnant on all that it touches. Love compels and commands us, urges us to create a better place around ourselves for all. It was with love that, as I held a copy of Exclaim! in my hand during the summer of 2003, someone behind the counter told me, "Hey, those guys have a record you would love."

Those guys were Constantines; that record was Shine A Light.

It was love.

Constantines were from Guelph, Ontario. But I didn't know that; I just knew them as a Toronto band, Toronto being a city I had drawn in my mind as a towering giant. They had just added new member Will Kidman to the band before Shine A Light released into the world in 2003, but I didn't know that yet either. I just saw the five of them standing on the cover of Exclaim! and listened to the kid behind the counter tell me that I couldn't leave the building without changing my life for the better. 

And he was right.

Constantines took what I knew of a country that was so big and wide and far away from where I lived, isolated up in the Yukon, and made it tangible. When Bry Webb sang with a gravitational desire in the scratches of his voice, it felt like he was singing from a core of understanding, of a place that he knew intimately, one that he wished for you to share with him.

Steve Lambke's guitars and vocals were the soundtrack to a fever pitch, holding the line at the edge of an implosion. Doug MacGregor's drums hit you so hard it felt like your chest might turn to dust and collapse before pulling back and letting your breath, holding you there in perfect harmony in time with the steady pulse of a nonstop rhythm, shared with Dallas Wehrle holding the line with precisive rhythm on bass. This was music I had waited my entire life to absorb, the hooks of each song embedded deep into my soul in the flutter of a heartbeat.

In 2003, I was 21 years old, out of high school and on the streets of my hometown with no sense of a future and no past to recall fondly. The world felt like it existed for everyone else save for me, languishing in stagnation and waiting for a change to happen to me when I least expected it. 

I had a job. My dad hired me to work in his glass shop on 4th Avenue, across the street from the Salvation Army kitchen and down the road from the bakery my mom worked in until she got too sick to work anywhere. I grew up blue collar; my dad worked in trades his entire life (still does to this very day) and all I knew was his world. He was hesitant at first for me to pick up tools and join him in his field, partly out of fear for my well-being and also somewhat because of his desire to see a different life for me than the one he had lived. Neither of us knew the change that would come with a used CD in the stereo of my car.

Constantines took what I knew of a country that was so big and wide and far away from where I lived, isolated up in the Yukon, and made it tangible...When [Bry] Webb sang, it was right to me, an arm around my shoulders that understood and shared the weight I carried.- Niko Stratis

Constantines, perhaps because they too are from small town streets, spoke to the need in my soul to find myself reflected in surfaces I hadn't even seen yet. Songs like "Young Lions" felt like doors opening in my heart, through which I was torn asunder and reborn fresh and new, ready for a world that awaited to delight my emotional nerves as they fired all at once. When Webb sang, it was right to me, an arm around my shoulders that understood and shared the weight I carried. "This is your kingdom."

The final verse of the song implores action:

Loosen your collar
Shake off the wires
Run like a river
Glow like a beacon fire

To my ears, nothing felt more necessary — a focusing lens applied to a source of destructive energy that urged me to move forward with purpose, to understand my own failings and my own desires as two complimentary spirits working in tandem.

Much of what we saw from our rock stars and pop idols in the early 2000s was the excess runoff of someone else's money. The Strokes and the New York of it all, those who paid for the authenticity of the street while knowing there was a wallet hiding in plain view that could buy its way out of any moment that faltered. Constantines, though — they felt like one of us. They sang of an authenticity earned with an air of authority, wonder and cautious humor. They sang of rivers and streets in a language that let you know they knew them the same way you knew yours, that you could conceivably find each other there together.

Hearing this band in the stereo of my car driving through the streets of Whitehorse — with names I had never learned but that had, all the same, seen me in stages of sin and triumph — was the first time I felt like there were cities and people in this country who I could connect with beyond the borders of a town that felt small and inescapable in equal measure.

I made it my mission to get out, and to find myself counted among the people who took the words they sang on their records to heart.

I remember working in construction and hearing those songs and just being like, 'Yeah, these guys understand me.' They are hugely, hugely influential to me as a writer.- Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem

One of those people is The Gaslight Anthem's Brian Fallon, who is such an ardent fan that he sports a "Young Lions" tattoo on his hands.

"It's the quintessential Constantines song; it's very soulful, very Springsteen," Fallon tells me about our shared love of that track. "You could tell there's a punkness there that has grown up."

"It's almost like what I wish — people are gonna get so mad at me — but it's what I wish Fugazi sounded like. It's everything I like in one band."

Fallon says Constantines were "pivotally important to Gaslight Anthem starting" and that he was particularly listening to them a lot when the band was writing their debut album Sink or Swim. "I remember working in construction and hearing those songs and just being like, 'Yeah, these guys understand me.'"

"They are hugely, hugely influential to me as a writer and to The Gaslight Anthem," he says. "We're just trying to be the Bruce Springsteen version of the Constantines."

Anyone who has seen a Constantines show can tell you the unmitigated thrill of time travel — the movement of minutes at a rapid clip, feeling timeless and lost in the same moment. Finding yourself standing there, arms raised triumphant in a V with others next to you in a unified front as the band sings just for you, just for all of us. Joining us together as one. 

I would see the Cons only a few times in the years they spent active as a band, sometimes seated plainly in the adult ambience of the Yukon Arts Centre and others in a throng of many mashed together in the pit at a dingy downtown bar next to a Greek-Italian fusion restaurant and a diner no one had ever eaten at. But each time, it was a transportation to another world, one outside of my hometown and the expectations and limitations of it. As the band played, we were all united together — speaking the same words, losing ourselves to the same momentous spirit. 

A few years ago in 2015, magic landed in the form of an impromptu Cons reunion onstage at the legendary Sappyfest in Sackville, New Brunswick. The band, joined by Julie Doiron, took the stage unexpectedly as Shotgun Jimmie called Young Lions to power; all of us within earshot raced to the tent faster than our feet and our exhaustion and intoxication could carry us and stood there, arms in the air in celebration and salute to our heroes. Landmarks guiding us on our way.