Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

"Best of" lists are, frankly, silly. How can one possibly decide the finest work unless all works in that category are considered? When it comes to recordings, there simply aren't enough hours in a day (or even a year) to listen to everything that's been released. As the saying goes: so much music, so little time. Rather than declare these nine albums the best of the year, I'm calling them nine of my favourite recordings that I came across in 2022.        Warm Chris - Aldous Harding One of the most intriguingly inscrutable singer-songwriters working today, the New Zealand-born, Welsh-based Harding defies predictability, with a chameleon-like voice that changes in tim...

There are seminal events in music history, seismic shifts that occur when forces of personality, timing and circumstance collide to create something truly monumental. Sometimes, they are individual moments, like when Chuck Berry wrote his genre-defining “Maybelline,” John Lennon met his future collaborator Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan plugged in and launched a musical revolution.  Other times, the milestone involves a gathering such as Woodstock or the Harlem Cultural Festival, known informally as the Black Woodstock, which became the subject of the recent award-winning documentary Summer of Soul. Both of those events took place in 1969, a year that saw a flurry of festivals; that s...

Los Angeles singer Tom Waits has always viewed his favorite denizens of the night with a charming romanticism. But with Rain Dogs Waits’s derelict characters have taken on gritty, three-dimensional life. On "Cemetery Polka" a sad accordion and rude trombone flesh out his vivid portrait of a wildly eccentric family. And the tinkling, aimless piano in "Tango Till They’re Sore" is well suited to the rambling imagination of the song’s narrator. But Waits is most coherent when he sticks to shattered dreams and tin-can sounds of alleyways. On several songs he uses makeshift percussion instruments to create a kind of hobo’s orchestra. His gift for idioms has always been impressive, but now, with a ...