Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Dressed in white lace stockings and a silky smoking jacket, she fluttered tentatively around the stage. With her frail figure and whispery voice, she seemed fragile under the spotlight’s glare. But as her pulsing, ethereal music gathered momentum, Jane Siberry spun a web around her audience in Detroit two weeks ago. At 29, Siberry has been hailed in Rolling Stone magazine as a “fascinating” new artist, and many critics feel she is the finest Canadian songwriter to appear in a decade. Once considered too eccentric for popular tastes, the Toronto singer is emerging into pop’s mainstream: her North American tour of 50 cities is currently under way, and last week 30,000 copies of her t...

After exhausting the musical possibilities of rhythm and blues over the past 30 years, pop music is searching for ways to rejuvenate itself. The Police found success with their own brand of Jamaican reggae, and such bands as Talking Heads, the English Beat and Culture Club have eagerly borrowed ingredients from other Third World sources. Now musicians— including the Police—are turning to Africa for inspiration. Of all the sounds to come out of that continent recently the most influential—and exotic—is the juju music of Nigeria’s King Sunny Adé. Last week Adé played two triumphant concerts in Montreal and Toronto to coincide with Synchro System, his first album to be released in Canada. ...

It begins with one of the most recognizable riffs in Canadian music: a simple piano intro that goes “dum, da-da-dadum, da-dum, da-da-da-dum.” Written by CanRock legends Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings, it’s the introduction to “These Eyes,” the Guess Who’s massive international hit of 1969. But then a sliding guitar cuts in, followed by some thumping bass and drums. By the time a voice starts rapping about being “in this game a long, long time,” the song has been transformed into something entirely different. “It’s Stick to Your Vision,” the new hit by Maestro, the Canadian artist formerly known as Maestro Fresh Wes. “I’ve seen a lot of valleys, I’ve seen a lot of peaks,” he reminisces in ...