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“I have wandered far and wide,” Daniel Lanois sings on the title track to his latest album, “all the way from Paris to Mexico.” The nomadic movements of Canada’s most acclaimed producer are the stuff of legend. After leaving Hamilton, Ont. in the early 1980s to work with U2 in a Dublin castle, Lanois has made a habit out of recording in unusual and far-flung settings: from a dairy barn in Somerset, England to a former porn theatre in southern California. For 10 years, he conducted much of his production work in an ancient, sprawling mansion in New Orleans. Even then, he championed the idea of portable studios and often took equipment with him on the road. Now, Lanois has returned from a year...

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 everythin...

Brad Roberts, the Crash Test dude, is no dummy. Although he’s a Grinch who hates Christmas, can’t stomach turkey and is practically Scrooge-like in his refusal to buy presents for people or accept gifts from others, he knows that Christmas music is too good a thing to pass up. And what better way to use The Voice—that infamous basso-profundo instrument of his—than to have it reverberate in all of its woofer-shredding glory on centuries-old hymns and carols? But Roberts, once dubbed “Professor of Irony at the School of Postmodernism,” didn’t stop there. He gave some of his favorite seasonal songs the sort of oddball twist that made Crash Test Dummies such a worldwide phenomenon. The result is...

Oasis is either the best, balls-to-the-wall rock ’n’ roll band of the last decade or the worst case in recent memory of media notoriety trumping musical talent. Blame the group itself for these wildly divergent views. While Oasis has been often capable of crafting crowd-pleasing, stadium-size rock anthems, the battling Gallagher brothers have also undermined their artistic credibility with binges, brawls and generally boorish behavior. Liam, in particular, has earned his yobbo stripes through fits of arrogance, cussing like a dockyard worker and talking shite, to use one of his own favorite expressions.  With the release this month of the two-disc, career-summarizing Stop the Clocks and...

Some people call me a teenage idol/Some people say they envy me/I guess they got no way of knowing/How lonesome I can be   “Teenage Idol” by Ricky Nelson     Justin Timberlake knows all too well what Ricky Nelson was singing about. From his days as a 12-year-old Mouseketeer on TV’s Mickey Mouse Club through his teenage years as a member of the superstar boy band ’NSync, Timberlake experienced pop fame even before he learned how to shave. Handling female-fan adulation and media attention came as naturally to him as smiling or pursing his perfectly bee-stung lips. But the transition from ’NSync teen idol to solo star at 22 hasn’t been quite so easy. First there was his famo...

Nadine McNulty remembers well the day that K’naan appeared at Toronto’s Afrofest. The year was 2000 and McNulty, as artistic director, had booked the then-unknown Somali-Canadian rapper to appear in the afternoon on the main stage at the popular outdoor festival. Rain showers failed to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm for K’naan, who performed with just one backup vocalist and a tape playback. Recalls McNulty: “It was drizzling and here was this young guy just kicking it in front of this sea of umbrellas. It’s amazing to see how he’s now taken the world by storm.”K’naan, this year’s Juno Award winner for Songwriter and Artist of the Year, is a major Canadian star and international crossover act...

Sarah Harmer’s new album—her first in five years—kicks off with the unsettling sound of crackling distortion followed by some driving electric guitar. “A new wind will blow through everything,” Harmer sings, somewhat ominously, “through everything I know.” It’s the dramatic opening of a recording that represents a stark shift away from the celebrated singer-songwriter’s last studio release, I’m a Mountain. Where that Polaris Prize-nominated album was steeped in bittersweet bluegrass, Harmer’s new oh little fire is a defiantly rockier and, mostly, happier affair. “I’ve always loved rock music and repetitive guitars and I do think this album sounds like some of my work with Weeping Tile,” says...

They sat in a box for 30 years, intimate photographs of the Beatles taken during the group's retreat in India in early 1968. Toronto filmmaker Paul Saltzman, then a backpacking 24-year-old on a spiritual quest himself, had snapped the pictures at a transcendental meditation workshop in the Indian village of Rishikesh led by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. After returning to Canada later that year, Saltzman sold some of the shots, along with an account of his "life-changing" experience, to Maclean's. But after that, he rarely thought about the photos, although he did return to the subcontinent many times.Then, two years ago, Devyani, Saltzman's teenage daughter from his marriage to film director D...

Sarah McLachlan was lounging in her air-conditioned trailer, exhausted but exhilarated after a day spent fielding media questions and a night spent singing, strumming and strutting on stage. Mountain View, Calif., an hour's drive south of San Francisco, was the third stop on the Lilith Fair tour, the all-women's rock festival she conceived that features top female musicians and a travelling New Age caravan of booths and boutiques (see below). McLachlan was settling into the rhythm of a schedule that has her both headlining the 35-stop tour and acting as its chief spokeswoman. Kicking off her sandals and curling up on a couch, the 29-year-old Canadian performer reflected on the high profile t...

For Joni Mitchell, fame has been a fickle lover. In the 1970s, it lavished her with sold-out tours and numerous magazine covers. She was the poetic, soul-baring artist from Canada who had taken up residence in the hills of California, becoming rock's lady of the canyon. But before the decade was over, Mitchell also felt the sting of rejection. Her jazzier, more abstract albums left many critics mystified. With little or no radio airplay, they sold poorly. Mitchell responded by abandoning the tour circuit. And, despite her three strong albums in the 1980s, her work was still being unfavorably compared with her early successes. "The pop arena is a harsh world, really," says Mitchell. "It moves...