Whispering Pines

WhisperingPines is the first comprehensive history of Canada's immensesongwriting legacy, from Gordon Lightfoot to Neil Young to Joni Mitchell and everyone in between.

Canadiansongwriters have always struggled to create work that reflects the environmentin which they were raised, while simultaneously connecting with a massaudience. For most of the 20th century, that audience lay outside Canada,making the challenge that much greater. While nearly every songwriter whosuccessfully crossed this divide did so by immersing themselves in the Americanand British forms of blues, folk, country, and their bastard offspring, rockand roll, traces of Canadian sensibilities were never far beneath the surfaceof the eventual end product.

What werethese sensibilities, and why did they transfer so well outside Canada? Witheach passing decade, a clear picture eventually emerged of what Canadiansongwriters were contributing to popular music, and subsequently passing on tofellow artists, both within Canada and around the world. Just as Hank Snowbecame a giant in country music, Ian & Sylvia and Gordon Lightfoot becamecrucial components of the folk revival. In the folk-rock boom that followed inthe late '60s, songs by The Band and Leonard Cohen were instant standards,while during the '70s singer/songwriter movement few artists were more reveredthan Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.

This is the first thorough exploration of how these, alongwith other lesser-known but no less significant, artists came to establish adistinct Canadian musical identity from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s.Anecdotes explaining the personal and creative connections that many of theartists shared comprise a large aspect of the storytelling, along withfirst-person interviews and extensive research. The emphasis is on theessential music - how and where it originated, and what impact it eventuallyhad on both the artists' subsequent work, and the wider musical world.

"...sure to become a key piecein the survey of popular music history. Schneider introduces picked-over subjects such as Leonard Cohen with such nuanced attention to personal humanity, it is as if the author has revealed them to us for the first time. Schneider beautifully weaves in the complicated relationships, both professional and personal, of the various artists who have come to define the sound of 20th-century American popular music (yes, American)."

-Publishers Weekly

“Whispering Pines is a vivid journey to the heart of the Canadian narrative song tradition, the nation’s most enduring form of self-expression. Jason Schneider is more than a passionate victim of the affirmative power of music; he’s also a master storyteller who brings to electric life the characters in this epic yarn, and illuminates their contributions to Canada’s — and the world’s — artistic treasury with stunning clarity and style.”

— Greg Quill, Toronto Star

“In Whispering Pines, Jason Schneider works like a tapestry artist in reverse: he pulls out key threads in the Canadian songwriting mythology and weaves something new — an indelibly-rendered, compelling new narrative about Canada’s most important artistic tradition.”

— Paul Cantin, NoDepression.com