Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Vancouver’s New Pornographers are one of indie-rock’s most revered bands—with good reason: gifted singer Neko Case and talented songwriters AC “Carl” Newman and Dan Bejar give the group an irresistible power-pop attack. The Pornos’ fifth album offers an embarrassment of riches, from the opener “The Moves” to the closing “We End Up Together,” both falsetto-laced, Beach Boys-inspired gems. In between, Neko’s siren voice sends shivers, while Carl and Dan keep the infectious melodies cranked up full.

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...

Dallas and Travis Good have worked with Neil Young, author Margaret Atwood, Randy Bachman, Buffy Sainte-Marie and actor Gordon Pinsent. But it was another Canadian icon—one with whom they’ve yet to collaborate—who offered some crucial wisdom. It was 1996, when their band the Sadies was getting started, and Dallas’ and Travis’ father, Bruce, of bluegrass heroes the Good Brothers, was celebrating his 50th birthday at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. Into the club walks Gordon Lightfoot, who’d had the senior Goods open for him during the 1970s. “Afterwards,” Travis recalls, “Lightfoot turned to us and says, ‘The only advice I’ll give you is do your own songs.’ We took heed and started getting rid of...

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.

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,...