Canadian Album Titles: Stories Behind the Names

The title canon

1. ***Moving Pictures* — Rush (1981).** The famous triple meaning: motion pictures (film), pictures that move (the movers carrying paintings on the cover, shot outside the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto), and the emotional sense — "moving" pictures. Three meanings, one perfect title, and a cover that shows the joke (see our Rush features).
2. ***Funeral* — Arcade Fire (2004).** The band's debut carries its grief in the title: during the album's making, several band members' relatives died, and the losses shadowed the sessions (see our Arcade Fire feature). What could have been a morbid name became, through the music, something closer to a celebration with tears in it.
3. ***After the Gold Rush* — Neil Young (1970).** Named for the California canyon country where it was written — the title evoking both the literal landscape of the Laurel Canyon scene and, critics noted, the end-of-an-era hangover the record embodied (see our Neil feature).
4. ***Jagged Little Pill* — Alanis Morissette (1995).** The phrase — bitter, small, impossible to swallow — captured the album's emotional pharmacology? — keep it clean: captured the album's whole posture: pain as something ingested and survived. The title arrived like the songs: precise, physical, and impossible to forget.
5. ***2112* — Rush (1976).** Stark and futuristic: the title is simply the story's year, stenciled like a prophecy. Prog's minimalism — the number as concept (see our concept-albums ranking).
6. ***The Suburbs* — Arcade Fire (2010).** Two plain words that opened the decade's biggest argument: Win Butler's Texas childhood rendered as subject, and the sprawl as both setting and condition (see our Arcade Fire feature). The plainness is the concept.
7. ***Blue* — Joni Mitchell (1971).** One word, chosen with the economy of the songs themselves: blue the color, blue the feeling, blue the note. Mitchell's titles generally work this way — Hejira, Court and Spark — phrases that sound like doors closing gently (see our Joni feature).
8. ***Fully Completely* — the Tragically Hip (1992).** Gord Downie's invented phrase — not quite idiomatic, completely felt — like the band itself: Canadian to the degree it defies translation (see our Hip features).
9. ***Harvest* — Neil Young (1972).** The plainest name for the plainest masterpiece: work, season, yield. Titles don't get more Canadian than an honest noun.
10. ***Bubba? no — Come On Over — Shania Twain (1997).** The bestselling country album in history arrives with an invitation for a title — hospitality as brand, the album title as front porch (see our Shania feature).

What the titles teach

Scan the list and the pattern is unmistakable: the Canadian title tends toward plain language carrying hidden depth — numbers, single words, honest nouns, invented phrases that feel like they've always existed. It's the national aesthetic again: no showing off, everything earned. The titles announce, quietly, that the songs inside will do the talking. The songs, as it happens, agree.