Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Jakob Dylan has forged a musical career in the shadow of his celebrity dad. The youngest of four children born to Bob Dylan and his ex-wife Sara, Jakob found comfort—if not anonymity—as a member of the Wallflowers, rockers whose 1996 album, Bringing Down the Horse, produced three Top 40 singles, won two Grammy Awards and sold four million copies. During that time, interview questions about his famous father were strictly off limits. Two years ago, Jakob invited parental comparison when he released Seeing Things, his folky solo debut. Now he has released the fine Women & Country. “Some of the things I’ve done, I’m educated enough to know it’s not necessarily the kind of music he always re...

The new album cover depicts her wielding a sword on the hood of a muscle car. What does it represent? Maybe Neko’s personal battle against mediocrity. The Virginian-born honorary Canadian (she cut her musical teeth in Vancouver’s indie scene) never settles for easy formulas. Here, the gifted singer delivers songs about tornadoes, birds and other wildlife. There’s even a chorus of crickets on the album’s closing track. Quirky, yes, but Neko is that rare breed of artist whose beguiling sound must be heard to be believed. February 2009

For years, Neko Case has been hailed as a siren, a honky-tonk angel with a stunning contralto described variously as “eerie,” “luscious,” “transcendent” and “the purest voice to emerge from the independent music scene in more than a decade.” But with her fourth studio album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Case has been winning high praise for another talent: songwriting. And the accolades for her songs are every bit as wide-ranging as those for her vocals. One critic even used four very different adjectives in a single sentence—“uplifting,” “melancholic,” “rollicking” and “ominous”—to describe them. Let’s just say that Case has never been easy to categorize. American born and Canadian bred,...

There’s a gulf in country music as wide as the Grand Canyon. On one side is a shopping mall, full of cowboy hats, sequins and schlocky songs with a well-polished sheen. On the other is a saloon, with soaring voices, twanging guitars and songs gutsy enough to shake the shingles loose. Neko Case resides on the saloon side of country. Over the course of three impassioned studio albums and countless tours of rowdy barrooms, Case has blazed a trail across North America that left fans awestruck and critics breathlessly drawing comparisons to Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. Now Case has made an album that captures the unbridled emotion of her live shows. Recorded in three different venues, including ...