People love lists. And music fans REALLY love them. The latest comes from Canada.

It's a book that compiles the top 100 albums recorded by Canadians in the past 50 years. There's plenty of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and the Band. And then, there are some dark horses...such as the indie rock band, the Weakerthans.

Their album, "Left and Leaving," came in at number 75...just behind Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown." We asked The World's Andrea Crossan to find out more about the Weakerthans. She responded with today's Global Hit.

The Weakerthans blend punk rock with folk music. Their home base is Winnipeg. The founder of the band, John K. Samson says that the cold prairie city provides constant inspiration.

Samson: "It's a marginalized city, both geographically and culturally - it's a really poor city, there's about 600,000 citizens and it seems to me to have the elements of greatness and sadness of, both a big city and a small town.. So it's a great standin for all cities."

Samson writes what he calls "first-person fiction". He'll write in the voice of a disheartened bus driver, a bored cashier, a dot-com millionaire. But some of the characters who inhabit Samson's lyrical world are not fictional. The band's new album, called Reunion Tour, includes a song dedicated to a man named David Reimer. His medical condition made him the fodder for tabloid attention and ridicule.

Samson: "David Reimer is a famous medical case study of a man who was born male and was raised female and then switched back to being a male and I think was taken advantage of by the medical profession and taken advantage of by many people just because he was from winnipeg actually, that he was from this marginalized place - he was just this cog in this giant machine of people who just used him as an answer to a question"

Reunion Tour is the Weakerthans fourth album. The band was born ten years ago. Samson came up with the name the Weakerthans.

Samson: "I was thinking of the great leftist hymns, solidarity forever, and there's a line in that "Oh what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, but the union makes us strong. I always thought that was a great line."

And there was the Marguerite Duras novel, The Lover.

Samson: "In the movie adaptation of it there's a scene where there's a guy in a bar who is challenged to a fight and he says go ahead, I'm weaker than you can possibly imagine - i always thought that was kind of sweet."

John K. Samson's music sketches portraits of the characters he sees around him. And he's obsessed with certain subjects....like the paintings of Edward Hopper. Samson saw an exhibition of the artist's work in London.

Samson: "I went in there and came out just thinking that I would write a record about 12 edward hopper paintings and that would be the next record. And I got two of them done and then I realised that I could focus on the themes in the paintings by speaking about other things."

One of the Hopper paintings Samson saw that day was "Sun in an Empty Room". It's a stark painting of an uninhabited space. Samson's song imagines a couple who are moving out of that room and away from each other.

John K. Samson's songs are softer and more personal than the political songs of his punk rock days. Still, there's an echo of those punk roots in the Weakerthans's music.

Samson: "I guess you know, we write pop songs but they are always going to be based in punk rock because that's how we learned how to play our instruments and kind of the ethics of that are a big part of our lives. I still feel like a punk rocker and whether I qualify or not it's still something that I cherish that i still feel connected to."
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The Weakerthans perform tomorrow night at the Magic Stick in Detroit. For the World, I'm Andrea Crossan.