Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Feist is sitting in a Latin American café in Toronto’s west end, sipping mint tea and talking enthusiastically about ocean waves. She’s just returned from a rare week off in Mexico, where she holidayed with buddies Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe, of Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience. “My friends were telling me to watch out for the riptide, because it’ll pull you out,” Feist recalls. “But all you have to do is just go with it and it’ll pull you back to shore. You just have to go the full cycle. People don’t have faith in that. They don’t realize it’s all about flow and cycles and currents.” She adds: “I’ve been thinking a lot about that stuff lately, about movement and the natura...

Toronto’s Music Gallery is housed in St. George the Martyr Church, on the edge of a park and a stone’s throw from Queen Street West. The tiny building, with its stained-glass windows and excellent acoustics, served as a fitting launch pad last March for Feist’s latest album, The Reminder. There, on an unseasonably mild evening, 200 invited guests sat on pews and waited for the Canadian artist’s arrival. As the lights dimmed, the anticipation was palpable. “Thanks for helping us kick off the training wheels,” said Feist, before she and her band performed 11 compositions from the album. The hour-long set served immediate notice that an important new songwriter had arrived. Of course, Feist was...

Colin Meloy has always had a vivid imagination. When he was in Grade Two, he wrote a play called The Bloody Knight, about a ghost that haunts a forest by a medieval castle. “It was particularly gruesome,” recalls Meloy cheerfully. “The ghost ends up slaughtering all of the knights at the castle.” The play was staged at his elementary school in Portland, Oregon for an audience of students and teachers. “Thankfully,” adds Meloy, “I had a really supportive teacher who didn’t seem too bothered by all the violence. These days, I’m sure that sort of thing would be cause for some concern within the educational system.” Fortunately, Meloy later found another creative outlet for his wild stories: The...