Aengus Finnan is cycling across Canada and collecting songs along the way. It’s a fun project, the kind of thing that could engage a high school geography class, as well as music nerds like me.

I first saw this on (the essential) webcurios back in June. There’s a website that has a map of Canada with the songs mapped to their locations. It’s easy to get lost in. Each song icon is clickable and links to a YouTube video of the song itself (yes, One Great City is on there, first thing I checked). Here’s the map:

Here’s the link to the map on the project’s website. You can submit a song that you think should be there, along with the name of the artist and the town that the song is about. Of course I submitted a song for my hometown. I got a sweet note back from one of Aengus’ helpers named Felicity, who lives in small-town Ontario herself. This is the most Canadian thing ever

Here’s the song I submitted, for my hometown of Elliot Lake, Ontario. My dad was a miner there and this used to play on the radio at 6am every weekday when I was growing up:

Using a Stompin’ Tom Connors song feels a bit like cheating. He’s the ultimate ringer for a site like this — he probably wrote songs about half the towns in Canada. He was also my dad’s favourite musician of all time, and my uncle’s chess buddy. Life is full of surprises.

Aengus himself is a musician born in Dublin and raised in Ontario. His Wikipedia page tells me he’s released two albums but they’re not on streaming services. I did find this recording of him performing a song called “Fly Away” about his dad, and it’s lovely:

ANYWAY: you can follow along with Aengus on his Instagram (currently approaching Coburg, Ontario), where his posts are accompanied by charming and warm stories. He’s supposed to wrap up on the West Coast in a little over a month.

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