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When Canadian musicians started a revolution SOUTH OF THE BORDER

I look back to when I was one and twenty, as A E Housman would have had it, and feel sure I was in my salad days. I had fallen in love with a generation of songwriters and was enjoying the folksy, pastoral music that was a gentler sibling of rock. We had a stereophonic recording player that was like a piece of furniture and it had a sliding door over the turntable and I often tried to squeeze my head into the cabinet so that I could hear, even better, the fierce emotions wrapped in such laid back and softly sung arrangements. When I married and had a home of our own I was enjoying listening to how this generation of Canadian songwriters began to influence the writers who would forge what we now call Americana.
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THE UNIVERSE IN THE WORD

a poetry reading event organised by the hard-working arts enthusiast Mercedes Minguela
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SONG TOWN: a site for songwriters

we Since looking at a couple of our favourite songwriters yesterday, in Sidetracks & Detours, our writing team, (music-lovers all) have been constantly discussing particular songwriters, such as Townes Van Zandt,, Guy Clark, John Stewart, Nanci Griffith and Mary Chapin-Carpenter (American all). We therefore added a couple of great British song-writers ,  and the names that fell out in conversation included Gary Hall, Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, the wonderful late John B Spencer and Julie Matthews.ti
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ELLIOTT SMITH Roman Candles: Count To Thirty

In every piece of music Elliott Smith released, I hear a restlessness I’ve yet to fully pin down
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RUNNERS AND RIDERS

John Stewart had a wonderful affinity with horses, and that is reflected in the three selections he has earned on this compilation of Runners And Riders
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WORDS RUN IN THE KENYON FAMILY

It read: “Olga Kenyon has performed a service to all who are interested not only in the written word, but in the changing lives of women”.
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FLY ON THE WALL PRESS

Greater Manchester can boast a plethora of excellent creative writing groups but I do feel that not enough authors go to a writing group. There’s a good one in Manchester called the Monday Night Group that meets every week at the Britons Protection pub.
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KATHY´S SONG for a girl I never knew

One of those songs I loved on the radio was Kathy´s Song by Paul Simon with a beautiful little guitar riff behind lyrics of his yearning for a girl who lived in a different country,
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TOWNES VAN ZANDT: man, myth and memories

I have a vivid personal memory of an occasion when I was working as a freelance journalist alongside the independent and excellent Stampede Promotions, a small two man operation that pledged the best-but-overlooked American singer-writers to the UK on small tours of some perhaps unlikely places.
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LEONARD COHEN´S LOADS OF BOOKS

In 2011, Cohen was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for literature. His poetry collection The Flame, which he had been working on at the time of his death, appeared posthumously in 2018.