If poetry is a lost art, Lenka Lichtenberg’s latest album is a welcome reminder that what is lost can also be found. In 2016, the Czech-Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter was in her native Prague, sorting through the belongings of her mother, who had just passed away; opening a drawer she discovered two worn notebooks filled with poems her grandmother, Anna Hana Friesová (1901-1987) … More Lenka Lichtenberg: Thieves of Dreams
Though their high-latitude homeland is more than twice the size of France, the Québécois know they’re surrounded by North America’s immense Anglophone universe and their geographic awareness has helped shape the tenacity and vibrancy of their culture. One of Quebec’s most dynamic musical forces is Le Vent du Nord, a folk band whose anniversary album, 20 Printemps (20 Springs) … More Le Vent du Nord: 20 Printemps
When Alex Cuba imagined his eighth album his dream may have seemed unreachable: He wanted songs that reflect the struggle and emotion simultaneously separating and uniting all humanity but he didn’t want them forever associated with a pandemic. If threading that needle wasn’t challenge enough, the albums behind him—earning him two Juno Awards, four Latin Grammys and three Grammy nominations—represented a tough act … More Alex Cuba: Mendó
They met at a fiddle jam in 2007 and married three months later; they live outside Horsefly, British Columbia, a village of 1,000 souls in the foothills of the Cariboo Mountains, where they build and sell banjos and raise their two children. Among the storybook details of their life together, the rarest is the music Pharis and Jason Romero make, a folk-country-bluegrass hybrid so fresh they might have picked … More Pharis and Jason Romero: Bet on Love
Quebec’s Route 132—stretching 1,000 miles (1,600 km), up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gaspé but skirting major cities—is a good metaphor for the journey of Erik and Sonny Caouette, who specialize in folk songs about family, friendship and small-town life. And like a highway, a thread connects the duo’s albums: Nous Autres (We Ourselves), the 2015 debut that made them an overnight sensation and earned two Félix awards (Quebec’s most … More 2Frères: À Tous Les Vents
In physics, politics and romance, poles apart tend to come together. Les Cowboys Fringants are not the only musicians who explore humanity’s darker reaches with comedy and cynicism, let alone with harmony and dance-provoking chords, but they’ve been doing it exceptionally well since 1997. On their tenth album, the neo-trad folk-country ensemble offers a rousing tour of Les Antipodes … More Les Cowboys Fringants: Les Antipodes
Dickens was right in concept but exaggerated the singularity of his age: It is always, in every era and every land, the best and worst of times. Great art often emerges from hard lessons, but sometimes songs written before a crisis rush toward our freshly frazzled nerves like first responders. When he released Sublime last fall Alex Cuba couldn’t have known a pandemic was imminent but today the music of his seventh album penetrates the haze of uncertainty … More Alex Cuba: Sublime
In the natural world, wind and time typically join forces to produce erosion and environmental damage, but the union of Le Vent du Nord and De Temps Antan, two leading bands on Quebec’s traditional music landscape, has a purely euphoric effect. The groups, connected by ties … More Le Vent du Nord & De Temps Antan: Notre Album Solo
Oz, Neverwhere, Asteroid B-612—great artists create worlds or pair real domains with fantasylands to explore larger questions. Count in this company Le Vent du Nord, vanguard of Québec’s progressive folk movement. On Territoires, they tread overlapping realms—the Québec and New France of today and of history, of the heart, imagination and aspiration. No surrealism in these territories but the ensemble more than compensates with soundscapes … More Le Vent du Nord: Territoires
Song can be a pathway to survival for threatened languages. Over the past generation the 10,000 speakers of Innu in Québec and Labrador have seen a creative surge in new music. The folk-rock duo Kashtin gained prominence in their community and in broader Canadian society, especially after their songs were featured on the TV series Due South and later on soundtrack compilations. It was at a music festival in Maliotenam, an Innu First Nations … More Shauit: Apu Peikussiakᵘ
