Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

My 13-year-old son, Duncan, came with me to a listening session for the new Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief, organized by EMI in an IMAX theatre equipped with massive, state-of-the-art, surround-sound speakers. Duncan writes about music for a magazine called Brand New Planet, so he had a legitimate reason for attending. (In truth he was more excited about seeing a sneak preview of The Matrix Reloaded that EMI had added.) As the lights in the IMAX theatre darkened and the hypnotic groove of the opening track “2+2=5” kicked in, my son and I settled in for an accentuated aural experience. By the time he heard the dreamy, rhythmic strains of “There, There,” Duncan leaned over to me and whispe...

It's Juno week again. And once more, those vying for awards in Canadian music's biggest lovefest run the gamut from artistic to plastic-from the always compelling Leonard Cohen to the prefabricated pop quartet Sugar Jones. The Junos, Canada's answer to the Grammys, have always been rife with eccentricities, as Cohen noted in 1993 while accepting an award. "It's only in a country like this," mused the man with the infamous monotone, "that I could get Male Vocalist of the Year." Cohen's competition that year included Neil Young, who is also not known for his dulcet tones. Young won the award two years later. After that, the category name was changed to Best Male Artist to prevent more bad joke...

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...