Every so often, us Canadians will get a bit down on ourselves, a bit self-conscious, a bit low of self-esteem. And that’s when the articles come out—why don’t people like us more than they do now? In the music world, those articles have been scarce as of late, thanks to the likes of Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, and a bunch more lesser-known Canadian indie bands that only the cool kids are supposed to know. But just before the current wave of Canadian success was a long, hard fallow period where the major American breakthrough us Canucks could point to was… Nickelback.

If you look through newspapers, alt.weeklies and music mags from the past decade and a half, no doubt you will find a lot of articles about how the Tragically Hip is the Rodney Dangerfield of Canadian music in America. The breathtaking inability of the Hip’s brand of literate alternative rock to break through Stateside is practically a national myth by now, with accompanying imagery to suit: club shows just south of the border with parking lots full of cars with Canadian license plates, like so many Leaf fans at a Buffalo Sabres game. Because these articles were never very long, and because the Hip have become so intricately tied to the phenomena of “popular in Canada, unknowns in the States,” they tend to gloss over the many similar stories from other Canadian bands that have never managed to take their successful formula and apply them down south. And of those many bands, the next biggest contemporary of the Tragically Hip would probably be Sloan.

“Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” with its jangly pop familiarity and a sunny spread of trumpeters to back everything up, is just one of the many fine songs off One Chord to Another, which represented Sloan’s second major attempt to break into the American market. The Halifax band’s first two albums, Smeared and Twice Removed, represent a discrete era of their own, when Sloan was courted by Geffen and the Halifax scene gained a short-lived reputation as a generator of cool, grunge-influenced guitar pop bands (also see Jale, Super Friendz and Thresh Hermit). With Sloan freshly divorced from DGC and deciding to continue after a short career-examining hiatus, they were ready for another kick at the can on their own terms. One Chord to Another was recorded mostly without label support and released on their own Murderecords label.

If you remember Sloan at all, it’s likely on the strengths of singles like “The Good in Everyone” and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” which both charted extremely well in Canada and convinced Sloan that the American market might not be lost. But as with any good story, there’s a twist. Unwilling to try another major label, Sloan instead decided to go with a smaller boutique label for the American release of One Chord to Another. Actually finding such a label turned out to be a bit of a problem, and as a result One Chord to Another didn’t get an American release until well into the album’s release cycle in Canada. A New York-based subsidiary of EMI, The Enclave, ended up putting together a deluxe double-gatefold release and included a bonus disc that has never been widely released in Canada—perhaps a sign of how serious Sloan was about success in the American market, or maybe of how easy success came to them in home territory.

The short story is that the bid failed; people liked One Chord to Another but Sloan remained little more than a curiosity to most Americans. And just like the last time Sloan failed to make a dent in the U.S., the problem may not have been the band itself but their label; shortly after One Chord to Another’s release in the States, The Enclave folded, and with it all promo support for the album. Sloan’s chances in the States were effectively finished for a second time. But unlike the soul-destroying fight with Geffen a few years earlier, Sloan’s second experience south of the border was a much more sanguine affair. Chris Murphy, in a post-Enclave interview, was relatively unbothered by the experienced. “We own all of our own records and just license them to the company,” he said. “I know that’s a boring angle, but not being on a major label really doesn’t affect us.”

Since then, Sloan has released albums on both sides of the border—last year’s Never Hear the End of It was released by Yep Roc—but with the band fairly comfortable in their career position, they no longer seem very worried about the U.S. at all. Much like the Hip, they’re quite content to play their shows up north and be treated like elder statesmen of the Canadian rock scene, always guaranteed respect and adoration from the home crowd.