Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot have long been mutual admirers. The legendary singer-songwriters began moving in the same circles in 1964, after Lightfoot was signed to Groscourt Productions by Dylan's manager Albert Grossman. It wasn't long before Lightfoot, at Grossman's suggestion, recorded Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." Although it would be several years before Dylan returned the favour and cut his own version of "Early Morning Rain," the "Blowin' in the Wind" singer had already expressed his fondness for Lightfoot's "I'm Not Sayin'" and several of his other tunes.  In the summer of '65, Lightfoot and Dylan crossed paths at Grossman's house in Woodstock, New York (Lightfoot e...

When Ian Tyson arrived in Toronto in September 1958, the folk music scene didn’t exist. The coffeehouses hadn’t yet appeared in Yorkville. The city’s bohemian district consisted of a few ramshackle cafés and galleries along a tiny stretch of Gerrard Street, near Bay, that attracted colorful personalities and painters like Harold Town. All of that was about to change with the Folk Boom ignited by the Kingston Trio and its massive hit “Tom Dooley.” Tyson had hitchhiked his way East from the West Coast, where he’d graduated from the Vancouver School of Art. He was 25 years old. His life experience at that point largely amounted to riding bareback in rodeos and playing a little guitar in rockabi...

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 blac...