Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

It's Juno week again. And once more, those vying for awards in Canadian music's biggest lovefest run the gamut from artistic to plastic-from the always compelling Leonard Cohen to the prefabricated pop quartet Sugar Jones. The Junos, Canada's answer to the Grammys, have always been rife with eccentricities, as Cohen noted in 1993 while accepting an award. "It's only in a country like this," mused the man with the infamous monotone, "that I could get Male Vocalist of the Year." Cohen's competition that year included Neil Young, who is also not known for his dulcet tones. Young won the award two years later. After that, the category name was changed to Best Male Artist to prevent more bad joke...

For more than 25 years, Leon Redbone has been successfully romancing the past with his Twenties show tunes and turn-of-the-century ditties. His first two albums, 1975's On the Track and 1977's Double Time, were surprise hits. Wearing his trademark fedora and Groucho Marx moustache, he became a fixture on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during the '70s and '80s. His fans included Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, who once told Rolling Stone that if he ever started his own label, Redbone would be his first signing. Now, Dylan has complimented him again: several songs on his latest album, Love and Theft, pay homage to Redbone's vaude- villian charms. So why has ...

Oh brother, what's going on here? Bluegrass and gospel suddenly seem as hot as hip-hop and electronica. Banjos and mandolins are replacing keyboards and drum machines as the instruments du jour. And sing-along hootenannies are taking over at least a few downtown clubs across the country. Ever since the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track started selling by the truckload, old-time country music is everywhere: at summer festivals, on college radio, even at the neighbourhood Starbucks. The trend has nothing to do with Nashville or guys in big hats with names like Garth. It's a musical revolution of a different sort -- out with the new, in with the old. Canadian guitarist Colin Linden, who co...

There's nothing morbid about Suzie Ungerleider. As her musical persona, Oh Susanna, she may be known for harrowing ballads of murder and destruction, all steeped in keening Appalachian-style vocals and plaintive pedal-steel guitars. But the acclaimed Canadian-based singer-songwriter is actually quite cheerful in person. The petite, soft-spoken musician smiled and giggled her way through most of a recent interview in Toronto. So where does this obsession with death come from? "It's really just a metaphorical device," explains the 31-year-old. "Many of my songs are about transformation. The characters in my songs, whether they're villains or victims, all go through profound changes. I like tha...

Is Hawksley Workman too good to be true? At 26, the Canadian singer-songwriter has already drawn comparisons to figures like David Bowie and Tom Waits—for two self-produced albums on which he wrote all the songs and played virtually every instrument. London's influential Time Out magazine has called him "quite possibly the coolest thing to come out of Canada." His performances—daring theatricality mixed with shameless romanticism—have elicited the sort of reviews usually reserved for rock royalty. Then there's his wildly improbable name. Is it something he lifted out of Dickens, or from an old travelling medicine show? Until recently, Workman wasn't saying. He first popped up in 1999 with hi...

When one of Africa’s most celebrated musicians receives visitors at his home in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, he lounges in little more than a striped bathing suit, which tends to slip down in the back. But when Fela Anikulapo Kuti jumps on stage to perform, his costume is a study in flamboyance. He wears a blue jump suit and pants embroidered with saxophones. His act is equally colorful. He sways his saxophone and waves his arms to keep his 27 musicians in line. Between blasts of his multicolored sax, Fela sings in pidgin English the provocative lyrics that have aroused the ire of the military government of his native Nigeria—and which have won him the title of the Afrobeat King, as critic...

One of hottest touring bands in Canada at the moment eschews the standard instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums in favour of sitar, dhol and tabla—mixed with a little Irish fiddle. Delhi 2 Dublin, a five-piece outfit from Vancouver, is riding a wave of South Asian music that has permeated western culture. This year, the group’s concert appearances have included dates at the Vancouver Olympics, the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Festival D’Été due Québec in Quebec City and the World Routes festival at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. “We play to mostly white audiences—it’s not brown people who are coming to see us,” says Delhi 2 Dublin’s tabla player Tarun Nayar. “And they do...

It's nearly impossible to imagine Margo Timmins as a bad-tempered diva. The angel-voiced singer of Canada's Cowboy Junkies has always been a point of calm in the stormy world of rock 'n' roll, a soothing balm amid so much angst, rage and excess. But three years ago, even the ever-gracious Timmins began to lose her cool. The Junkies had just released their eighth album, Miles from Our Home, and she and her bandmates felt it wasn't getting the marketing support it deserved from its U.S. label, Geffen Records. During a flight to Los Angeles, Timmins finally expressed her festering frustration to her brother Michael, the band's guitarist and songwriter. "I was ready to quit," Margo recalls. "Dea...

What a difference a few decades make. When Queen first came to prominence in the early 1970s, the British band was panned for its bombastic blend of glam rock and heavy metal posturing. The five-word dismissal by Village Voice critic Robert Christgau of Queen II  (“Wimpoid royaloid heavoid android void.”) was typical at the time. Fast forward to the early ’80s and Queen, led by flamboyant frontman Freddie Mercury, is performing in Latin American soccer stadiums to rock’s largest audiences. A decade later, after Mercury’s AIDS-related death, the band gets a commercial boost when “Bohemian Rhapsody” is featured in the movie hit Wayne’s World. Now, the belated coronation is complete, and Q...

Chicago is the cradle of modern blues, the place where Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf urbanized and electrified the music of the Mississippi Delta. But, during the ’70s, the windy city also gave rise to two of the finest singer-songwriters that America has ever produced: John Prine and Steve Goodman. Like bookends in a vast library of American roots music, Prine and Goodman shared stages and a gift for wry, witty and often poignant compositions. Between them, they wrote hundreds of country, bluegrass, folk and rock ’n’ roll songs, many of which are now considered standards and covered by others: Jimmy Buffett recorded Goodman’s politically incisive “Banana Republics” and Willie Nelson made Go...