Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

She ran away to join the circus. Although she’d been signed to prestigious Atlantic Records and was being touted as an Edith Piaf for the new millennium, Lhasa de Sela turned her back on the music business. Ultimately, the runaway success of her first album, La Llorona, a stunning collection of stylized Mexican ballads and European gypsy tunes all sung in Spanish, proved to be too much for her. “I needed to get away from it for a while,” explains de Sela. “I’d been touring constantly for two years and getting offers to do these amazing gigs all over the world.  But I got badly burnt out and started experiencing these intense feelings of anxiety. I just finally had to say no to everythin...

“I have wandered far and wide,” Daniel Lanois sings on the title track to his latest album, “all the way from Paris to Mexico.” The nomadic movements of Canada’s most acclaimed producer are the stuff of legend. After leaving Hamilton, Ont. in the early 1980s to work with U2 in a Dublin castle, Lanois has made a habit out of recording in unusual and far-flung settings: from a dairy barn in Somerset, England to a former porn theatre in southern California. For 10 years, he conducted much of his production work in an ancient, sprawling mansion in New Orleans. Even then, he championed the idea of portable studios and often took equipment with him on the road. Now, Lanois has returned from a year...

Mention the White Stripes and most people think of garage-rock revival groups like the Strokes and the Hives. True, the Detroit duo does owe something to the raw, three-chord tradition of 1960s’ classics like “Louie Louie” and “Wild Thing.” But the group’s tastes run much deeper, all the way back to blues artists like Son House and Blind Willie McTell, prompting some critics to describe them as a mutant blues band. Fact is, singer-guitarist Jack White and his ex-wife drummer Meg White are art-rockers—not of the King Crimson variety, but of the modernist aesthetic sort. From their name, taken from the peppermint candy and symbolizing childhood and innocence, to their use of simple musical for...