Highway Girl (Live - Double Suicide Rant) - Tragically Hip

Gord Downie's 'Double Suicide' monologue during a performance of Highway Girl.


She had a beautiful apartment
She had a beautiful apartment
Well, actually it was a lousy apartment
But sh-she's very handy with her hands
And she's got architectural digest magazines
So she knows what she's doing
She likes to decorate her apartment in the Santa Fé tradition
I told her it was dated
But I see more of the world than she does
She got an apartment where the property was cheap
Next to the free way
She said "I save lots of money but I lose lots of sleep,
in my apartment where the property is so cheap"

And We'd Laugh! And We'd Laugh! And We'd Laugh!
Ah, and we'd take pop shots at the passing cars Ping
And We'd Laugh!
We were dumping the body and we'd laugh.
We found a place that was dark and rotten,
a place where the police helicopters would never spot us.
I destroyed the map that we'd so carefully plotted.
Every day we're dumping a body, she and me
Every single day.

And we'd laugh about it.

That's when I knew it was time that we both killed ourselves together. Together we were nothing but a menace. Apart we were nothing but lonely. I read too much. I thought we should kill ourselves. She doesn't read a thing. She believed me.

Are you really the messiah?
Yes I am.

She was younger than me too, she was younger than me. And I said to her, I said, You know Colline, no one stamps on a burning bag of shit anymore. Nobody!

Are you really the messiah?
Yes I am.
Believe it.

So we opted to kill ourselves, as I said, but we had one rifle and one bullet, so I told her to put her head down close to the barrel and put the barrel sort of into her mouth and I'd be right behind it with my head right behind hers and I said her life would end instantly; mine might have a few extra minutes of agony and suffering.

She couldn't pull the trigger, so we attached a string to it around the lamp and to the doorknob.

The first person to come into her cheap fucking apartment would blow both our heads off.

Then we got, we got to thinking; we changed our minds. You know, I mean, we got scared. And, ah, and, and kind of chickened out.
And we'd laugh, you know, we'd laugh together. What were we thinking? We're not; together we're not that bad. We're not that bad. We don't need to kill ourselves. We don't need to kill ourselves.

And then the D-train rattled overhead and knocked the joor, door ajar, the joor adar, the door ajar, the door ajar, the jar adoor. The lock... the faulty lock, the door swung open.

And killed her.

That's my story
and I'm stickin' to it