Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

The legacy of Gordon Lightfoot's music is in good hands, thanks to his longtime backing group of Rick Haynes, Barry Keane, Mike Heffernan and Carter Lancaster. Those veteran musicians are committed to keeping the master's songs alive. Last Saturday (Jan. 27), the Lightfoot Band made its debut at Toronto's El Mocambo with its newest member Andy Mauck on vocals and rhythm guitar. Anyone worried about how the American-born singer might sound delivering those classic songs can rest assured: Mauck, vocally, is a dead ringer for 1970s and '80s-era Lightfoot. Plus, he's humble as hell, repeatedly saying what an honour it was to be asked to join the band and sing the songs of his hero. "Gord was a s...

The Trans-Canada Highwaymen is a supergroup made up of members of Barenaked Ladies (Steven Page), The Odds (Craig Northey), Sloan (Chris Murphy) and The Pursuit of Happiness (Moe Berg), singing classic Canadian songs by the likes of Pagliaro, Lighthouse, Andy Kim, April Wine and The Guess Who. They’ve already released Explosive Hits Vol. 1, their recordings of 14 of those chart-toppers. But the beauty of the TCH concept when performed live is that it adds a whole other dimension of Canadiana with the biggest hits by the members’ own bands.  So, last night at Toronto’s venerable Horseshoe Tavern, the four horsemen of the K-Tel generation, treated the sold-out crowd to note-perfect c...

A two-hour documentary that aired on television in 2009 and was released on DVD  that same year. Looks at the digital age of Canadian music in the 1980s, a visual era of big hair and shoulder pads, when music videos helped homegrown artists to take off internationally.The documentary is split into nine segments: - Video Rock - Reggae / New Wave - Quebec Pop - Art, Pop & Politics - Alt-Country - Heartland Rock - Roots / Hip Hop - Blues Rock - Divas & Icons Songs featured in concert footage and videos (in alphabetical order): "A Criminal Mind" – Gowan "Ain't No Room For Cheatin' – Handsome Ned "Black Velvet"&nbs...

A two-hour documentary that aired on television in 2009 and was released on DVD  that same year. This Beat Goes On tells the story of Canadian music in the 1970s, a ground-breaking era of great sounds, from glam and progressive rock to punk and reggae.  Mixing archival footage with candid interviews, the documentary features proven hitmakers as well as a wealth of new folksingers, blues artists and mullet-rockers. Solo artists and progressive rockers still rule, but it’s also a time of shaved heads and skinny ties, as punk and new wave artists push their way into the spotlight. By the end of the decade, the Can-rock revolution has arrived. This Beat Goes On presents ...

 A two-hour documentary that initially aired on Canadian TV in January, 2006 and was released on DVD on December 11, 2007. The documentary captures the sounds of the 1960s in Canada, from the folk music of Ian and Sylvia, and the rhythm 'n blues of Ronnie Hawkins, to the many other legendary stars like Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who, Neil Young, Anne Murray, The Band, cult heroes like David Wiffen, The Collectors and Mashmakhan, and some of Canada's brightest younger stars including Blue Rodeo, Barenaked Ladies and Sarah Harmer. Full of candid interviews with more than 60 iconic figures.         Here is a list of all the songs featured, taken from concert footage and T...

Gordon Lightfoot, who passed away May 1, would have turned 85 today. His legacy includes songs that will live on for decades to come. Success didn’t come easy for him. In the beginning, Lightfoot worked hard at learning everything there was to know about music. Long before his first hit records, Lightfoot tried choir singing, barbershopping, pop crooning, jazz drumming and square dancing. While in a folk duo called the Two Tones, he even jumped on the Belafonte craze and belted out a calypso. When he was 19 and studying jazz composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Hollywood, Lightfoot and three fellow students moonlighted as the Four Winds, recor...

Last night at Toronto’s historic Cameron House, Doug Paisley hosted his popular but all too occasional Golden Country Classics show, giving the packed front room a cozy respite from a nasty pre-winter storm. The acclaimed singer-songwriter delivered resonant renditions of well-worn weepers by Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and George Jones, backed by Blue Rodeo’s sturdy rhythm section of Bazil Donovan and Glenn Milchem, ace fiddler Kendel Carson and master ivories tickler John Sheard. A superb composer himself, Paisley also sang his fine “Starter Home” before delivering warm, lovingly burnished covers of Ron Hynes and Bob Dylan. Paisley’s Toronto appearances are all too infrequent these days, so...

A master of reinvention, Bob Dylan is never content to play a song the same way twice. Last night at Massey Hall, the self declared song-and-dance man entertained with interpretations of numbers drawn from his own back pages (with the exception of a Grateful Dead cover and an American Songbook standard) that rendered them virtually unrecognizable. Sometimes this was a thrilling novelty, with a hatted Dylan standing behind a grand piano and belting out a bluesy, saloon-style rendition of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” like an less frenzied Jerry Lee Lewis. At other times, it was a frustrating mystery. Trying to identify a song by lyric wasn’t always possible because of Dylan’s chronic case of mu...

In July 2005, I spoke with Sinéad O'Connor about her reggae album, Throw Down Your Arms, that she’d recorded in Jamaica with Sly and Robbie. There was a lot going on in the world at the time. Live 8, the series of anti-poverty benefit concerts organized by Bob Geldof on the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, had just taken place. The news cycle was filled with horrific stories about the suicide attacks by Islamic terrorists that killed 56 early-morning commuters on the London Tube. We talked about those events, as well as ganga, God and her decision never to revisit her pop past again.  But Sinéad was musically motivated—Throw Down Your Arms was her first recording since her t...

More than any other singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot personified Canada. His robust songs about winter nights, morning rain, being bound for Alberta and sailing on Ontario’s Georgian Bay came closest to expressing for many Canadians the essence of life in the Great White North. Historical epics stood alongside romantic ballads. Author Pierre Berton once said that Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” conveyed as much about the building of the national railway as his own best-selling book on the subject. When Lightfoot died Monday evening at the age of 84, leaving a vast legacy of more than 500 songs, Canada lost a masterful composer, a distinctive vocalist and one of its ...