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Sarah Harmer is no technical whiz. Sure, like any musician, she knows her way around a recording studio. She has a cellphone and an email-equipped laptop computer, which she tries to use to correspond with family and friends. Her record distributor even gave her a digital voice recorder for Christmas, which Harmer took on a Mexican vacation in the hope of capturing song ideas. Unfortunately, she left it switched on and the batteries were dead before she could figure out how to use it. Then, when Harmer returned to Canada, her old Ford Econoline van, which she’d left parked at her parents’ farm outside of Burlington, Ont., wouldn’t start. Alone in the farmyard, she was more than a little frus...

On a blustery night in November 1975, Gordon Lightfoot was sitting in his writing room on the third floor of his Beaumont Road house in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood, working on songs for his next album. Needing more fuel for the task, he headed downstairs to his kitchen for coffee. A report on the 11 p.m. CBC news told him of the sinking of a giant freighter, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, in a fierce storm and the loss of all 29 men aboard. “I remember it so well,” Lightfoot told biographer Nicholas Jennings. “The wind was howling even in Toronto that night, and I went back up to the attic thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like up on Lake Superior. It must’ve been awful. I didn’t ...

“Trains and Boats and Planes” is the title of a Burt Bacharach song about love lost to travel. The phrase also perfectly captures Gordon Lightfoot’s lifelong fascination with the machinery of those forms of transportation and, more poetically, tales of romance and tragedy involving them.  So many of Lightfoot’s songs reflect this interest. Three of his most famous compositions, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “Early Morning Rain,” tell of the building of the trans-Canada railway, the sinking of an iron-ore-carrying freighter and of big 707 jetliners taking off without a young homesick Lightfoot aboard.  Throughout his l...

I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.                                                                                                                     So spoketh Sweet Baby James Taylor. Gordon Lightfoot was never bald and, therefore, not much inclined to collect hats. But he did once own a distinctive Homburg. Not the formal, stately kind made famous by Winston Churchill. Lightfoot's was ...

There's plenty to love about Martin Scorcese's new Netflix documentary about Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour. There are some illuminating present-day interviews with cast members including the masked ringleader Dylan himself, although he claims to barely remember anything about the tour, as he wasn't "even born yet." The story itself is one of rock's great dramas. Rolling Thunder was an entirely different way of touring. It began with the idea of Dylan, his buddy Bobby Neuwirth and mentor Ramblin’ Jack Elliott playing small venues while traveling around in a station wagon. When that proved impractical, it grew into a larger, illustrious cast of characters that included Joan Baez, Roge...