Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

"Best of" lists are, frankly, silly. How can one possibly decide the finest work unless all works in that category are considered? When it comes to recordings, there simply aren't enough hours in a day (or even a year) to listen to everything that's been released. As the saying goes: so much music, so little time. Rather than declare these nine albums the best of the year, I'm calling them nine of my favourite recordings that I came across in 2022.        Warm Chris - Aldous Harding One of the most intriguingly inscrutable singer-songwriters working today, the New Zealand-born, Welsh-based Harding defies predictability, with a chameleon-like voice that changes in tim...

In February 1968, Ian and Sylvia made a pilgrimage to Music City, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry, to record their Nashville album with session cats like Fred Carter, Jerry Reed and Harold Bradley. The Byrds hadn’t yet arrived to make their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album and it would be a full year before Bob Dylan showed up to record Nashville Skyline. After years of being overlooked, Ian and Sylvia’s Nashville is now finally recognized as the first pop-country crossover album. Both it and the subsequent Full Circle paved the way for the duo’s landmark country-rock album, Great Speckled Bird, recorded in Nashville with Todd Rundgren as producer. “...

There are seminal events in music history, seismic shifts that occur when forces of personality, timing and circumstance collide to create something truly monumental. Sometimes, they are individual moments, like when Chuck Berry wrote his genre-defining “Maybelline,” John Lennon met his future collaborator Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan plugged in and launched a musical revolution.  Other times, the milestone involves a gathering such as Woodstock or the Harlem Cultural Festival, known informally as the Black Woodstock, which became the subject of the recent award-winning documentary Summer of Soul. Both of those events took place in 1969, a year that saw a flurry of festivals; that s...