Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Gordon Lightfoot has always been fascinated by big mechanical things like trains and boats and planes, and man’s relationship to them. Three of his most famous songs, “Early Morning Rain,” “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” deal in the romance and tragedy of human interaction with the machinery of those forms of transportation. Personal and poetic, “Early Morning Rain” expressed a palpable longing while expertly contrasting the rural past and urban present in one brilliant line about freight trains and jet planes. Lightfoot placed himself directly in the story, summoning his own experience of travel and homesickness for inspiration. His memories of big 707s...

She’s not entirely new to the scene, having released a pop music EP in 2013. But Canada’s Elise LeGrow is now getting an international buzz, thanks to her sizzling debut album, Playing Chess. Working with soul legend Betty Wright, the Roots’ Questlove and members of the Dap Kings, who once backed Amy Winehouse, the 30-year-old Toronto singer puts a fresh spin on classic r&b songs from Chicago’s iconic Chess record label. She turns Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” into a wistful ballad, gives Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” a haunting rock edge and transforms Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me,” into slow, sultry jazz. Already the album, released on New York’s S-Curve Records, home of Joss Stone...

The brainchild of Toronto-based, Illinois-born Meg Remy, U.S. Girls’ latest is a deliciously subversive affair: tart political protests wrapped in sweetly seductive dance grooves. The Juno-nominated artist conveys anger over American gun violence with the Blondie-style disco of “Mad as Hell” and expresses rage about sexual assault with lush horns reminiscent of David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”