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 everythi...

1. Janelle Monáe -  Dirty Computer She’s made two conceptual albums featuring her alter-ego, the time-traveling android Cindi Mayweather, and starred in two films: the Oscar-winning Moonlight and Hidden Figures . And yet a major commercial breakthrough has so far eluded her. But this could be Monáe’s moment. Working with Prince before he died in 2016, Monáe went on to create a strikingly personal album. The sensual “Make Me Feel” is a direct homage to Prince’s “Kiss,” while “Americans” resembles the free spirit of his “Let’s Go Crazy” and the finger-popping “Pynk” channels the Purple One’s sexually liberated anthems. Monáe uses her new album to explore themes of femininity, LGBTQ and bl...

Classically trained operatic tenor and pianist Jeremy Dutcher recently won the Polaris Music Prize (Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury Prize) for Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa , an album of songs sung in his native Wolastoq dialect. Wolastoq is a dying language, spoken by only one hundred people within his First Nation community, but Dutcher was inspired by a “song carrier” to seek out his people’s ancient songs and breathe new life into them. The result is a post-classical recording of stunning beauty. “I was sitting around elder Maggie Paul’s kitchen table, having this discussion about the musical life of our community,” recalls Dutcher, a member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick w...