Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

By now, the world is familiar with the artistry of England’s Florence Welch, the powerful vocalist-frontwoman of the popular indie-rock band that bears her name. She’s partial to laying down her massive, layered gospel voices over soaring orchestral synths and booming percussive flourishes. Less familiar is the more subdued side of the London-born singer. On her band’s fourth album, Welch strips her music back to its bare essentials. “Grace,” a touching tribute to her younger sister, is just piano and vocals. “No Choir,” as the title suggests, also eschews anything but voice and keyboards. There are tracks with lusher instrumentation, including “Hunger,” a confessional about her teenage eati...

Drake became a global superstar by baring his soul, expressing personal truths about relationships rather than boasting about guns and drugs. His fifth album, named after his zodiac sign, continues the tradition, with the biggest revelation being his admission of fatherhood on two separate tracks. On “Emotionless,” Drake raps: “I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world, I was hiding the world from my kid.” “We only met two times," he says of Sophie Brussaux, the Frenchwoman who’s rumored to be the mother of his son, before expressing angst about being a single parent. Elsewhere, Drake takes aim at his rivals in the hip-hop world on “Survival” and sums up his success on “Sandra Rose” with the lin...

Uneven albums and a long stint as a coach on TV’s The Voice kept Christina Aguilera from cementing her status as one of pop’s most gifted singers. Now she’s broken free and found her way with this, her eighth album and first in over five years. Mixing hip-hop, reggae and dance elements with her signature power ballads, the 15-track collection is Aguilera’s unwavering statement of independence and self-discovery. Always adept at picking collaborators, she teams up with Kanye West on the infectious “Accelerate” and “Maria” and with Anderson. Paak on the edgy “Sick of Sittin.’” “Right Moves” is a sexy island-flavoured workout, while the Julia Michaels-penned “Deserve” is an anguished r&b co...

The essential message of this surprise album by Beyoncé and Jay-Z can be found on the closing track “Lovehappy.” “We broke up and got back together,” raps Jay-Z. “Now we’re happy in love,” replies Beyoncé. The husband-and-wife superstars, who 15 years ago famously proclaimed to be “crazy in love,” have weathered their share of marital discord, as revealed on their Lemonade and 4:44 albums. But Bey and Jay, who was born Shawn Carter, have clearly worked out their problems and these nine tracks celebrate the reconciliation. On “713,” the area code for Beyoncé’s hometown of Houston, her husband calls his wife a “black queen” and raps “you rescued us.” Queen Bey raps more than she sings, shining...

She’s a groundbreaker, bringing African music into the pop mainstream. Now the Grammy-winning diva has pulled off an impressive feat: taking Talking Heads’ classic 1980 worldbeat album and deepening its essential African-ness, upping the hypnotic polyrhythmic grooves on “Crosseyed and Painless” and turning “Once in a Lifetime” into a joyous carnival celebration.

Neko’s latest is a gem—self-produced and full of melodic charms and fairy-tale delights. “Bad Luck” is all soaring girl-group harmonies, while “Oracle of the Maritimes,” co-written with Laura Veirs, and “Gumball Blue,” one of two songs penned with New Pornographers bandmate Carl Newman, take listeners deep into the raven-haired siren’s rich, imaginative world.

One of the brightest, most refreshingly original female singers to emerge from the UK in the last dozen years, Allen suffered several personal and professional setbacks, including her split from the father of her two daughters, a battle with substance abuse and the lukewarm response to her last album, 2014’s Sheezus. Allen has also been given a rough ride by the British tabloid press. But her’s fourth album is a triumphant comeback in which the 33-year-old “Smile” singer has taken control of her story with starkly honest confessional songs. On “Apples,” she sings quietly over a simple keyboard riff about how her breakup with her husband mirrors her parents’ divorce. And she tackles her bad p...

This five-song EP is the second recording collaboration between the indie rocker and the Hollywood actress, following their 2009 album Break Up. That album, according to Yorn, dealt with “an unraveling relationship,” while Apart  deals with what he describes as the love affair’s “aftermath.” Johansson, who released an album of Tom Waits covers with 2008’s Anywhere I Lay My Head, duets with Yorn on the Fleetwood Mac-like “Bad Dreams” and the chiming “Iguana Bird.” “It is always a pleasure to sing with Yorn,” says Johansson, “because our voices and stories complement each other.” Indeed they do. The dreamy “Movies” is a perfect example of the sensuous weave of their vocals over a moody, m...

He’s still only 19 but, with his third album, the Toronto-born pop star now sounds fully grown up. Gone are the innocent songs in favour of mature numbers with an edgier sound. Mendes had some help to pull off the transition. His friend Ed Sheeran co-wrote one of the album’s strongest songs, “Fallin’ All in You,” sung by Mendes in his mellifluous falsetto, while his mentor John Mayer produced “Like to Be You,” and provided a bluesy guitar solo to the catchy song, a duet with Julia Michaels, of "Issues" fame. Michaelsa also sings with Mendes on “Nervous,” a Bruno Mars-style funk number she also co-wrote. Other contributions include OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder’s co-write on the electro-ti...

She’s made two conceptual albums featuring her alter-ego, the time-traveling android Cindi Mayweather, and starred in two films: the Oscar-winning Moonlight and Hidden Figures. And yet a major commercial breakthrough has so far eluded her. But this could be Monáe’s moment. Working with Prince before he died in 2016, Monáe went on to create a strikingly personal album. The sensual “Make Me Feel” is a direct homage to Prince’s “Kiss,” while “Americans” resembles the free spirit of his “Let’s Go Crazy” and the finger-popping “Pynk” channels the Purple One’s sexually liberated anthems. Monáe, who has been romantically linked to actress Tessa Thompson, uses her new album to explore themes of femi...