Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

The deluge of Dylan ephemera keeps a-washing over the land. This hour-long DVD of 1965’s Q & A session in San Francisco captures the 24-year-old rising star at his playful, combative best. “We’ve been booed all over by people,” says Dylan about the Newport debacle. “They must be pretty rich to go somewhere and boo.” Promoter Bill Graham and poet Allen Ginsberg are also in attendance and join the inquisition. As media circuses go, it’s less manic than Beatles press conferences but still highly entertaining and insightful.

With his band El Torpedo, Mays crafts excellent alt-country-rock songs about lost love and endless highways. On this solo album, the Nova Scotia surfer dude explores similar themes but in a variety of styles. “Beach Party,” with its spacey keyboard dub, sounds like something from The Beta Band, while the title track, featuring a guest vocal from rapper Buck 65, is an urban-flavored delight. And when Mays returns to jangly California sounds on “Morning Sun,” it’s as gorgeous as anything he does with El Torpedo.

The woolly-hatted one is back. For his latest album, the Boy, born Damon Gough, pays tribute to growing up in England, with a nod to his hero Bruce Springsteen. While there’s nothing as spirited as the Boss’ “Thunder Road” or “No Surrender,” Gough has a way with modest pop songs about life’s futility, such as the piano-laced “Without a Kiss” and the acoustic blues “Time of Times.” The rocking title track sums up all things English, including royalty, The Sex Pistols and the country’s “sense of loathing and belonging.”