Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

He was an unlikely pop star of the post-Woodstock era. Clean-shaven and pipe-smoking, with short, clipped hair and a preference for cardigans and safari jackets, he looked more advertising executive than hip musician. But Canada’s R. Dean Taylor was always determined to make it in the entertainment world. Venturing to Detroit in the early 1960s, he landed himself a job at Motown and became an anomaly – a white songwriter at a black rhythm-and-blues record label. Like many session singers and musicians, it seemed Mr. Taylor was forever destined to be just another background player, standing in the shadows of Motown. That changed when his song “Indiana Wants Me” catapulted him to stardom. Afte...

Here, in alphabetical order, are the artists who made some of my favourite music of 2021. These are the albums that excited me most and that I turned to again and again throughout the year. Some, like Adele, Rhiannon Giddens and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, are international musicians I’ve been following from the start of their careers. Others, like Arooj Aftab and Mdou Moctar, are more recent global discoveries. The rest all come from closer to home and stand alongside the best I’ve heard in the past 12 months. Adele - 30  England’s Adele has a habit of naming albums after her age. She also has a tendency to belt out ballads, the kind that huge numbers of people respond to, s...

In the world of Top 40 radio, Rosalie Trombley was a trailblazer – one of the few women to hold a broadcast executive position in an industry that was essentially a boys-only club. Blessed with an innate sense of music, she could pick out a good song from a pile of duds and help to make it a hit, earning her the nickname “the girl with the golden ear.” Ms. Trombley made her mark as music director at Windsor, Ont.’s powerful CKLW, known as “the Big 8,” whose 50,000-watt signal could be heard widely in the United States as well as across southwestern Ontario. Her influence in choosing what music to play was equally far-reaching: when she put a song into rotation, other stations followed suit. ...