Canadian Winter

When the snow sets in, and the cold makes outside a place we'd rather not be, some of us follow the hibernation instinct — but Canadian musicians, it seems, get busy and set about transforming the whitened world into sonic gold dust. Some plough an introspective furrow (Neil Young, Ron Sexsmith), others pop the corks for a celebration (Colin James & The Little Big Band) . . . . . . and the rest go hockey-crazy, as you'll hear in Next Steps.

What better way to begin our next batch of winter tracks than with Canada's second national anthem — Dolores Claman's theme to Hockey Night in Canada — backed up, naturally enough, by Stompin' Tom Connors . . . "Oh, the good old hockey game." Not everyone's cheering, though. Alt-country siren Kathleen Edwards offers a wistful foil to the culture of winter machismo, with "Hockey Skates." Blizzards have a sideways effect on the creative mind — in Deep Cuts.

Here we've piled up a snowdrift of artists who respond to the Canadian winter with a heightened sense of poetry — Rheostatics' "A Midwinter Night's Dream" is fevered and allusive, "What the Snowman Learned About Love" by Stars fires the imagination with a squall of retro-synths, and Ralph weaves his signature melancholic narrations through "January's a Good Time for Jazz" and "Early Morning Cold Taxi."

Ah, to be in Canada in the wintertime. The season is a powerful force on Canadian songwriters, who explore the depth and the lightness of the human soul in this superlative collection of tracks connected — tangentially or directly — to the sub-zero universe. Whether it's Corb Lund breezing through the story of how "The Truck Got Stuck" without a care in the world, or Leonard Cohen singing like he's got the world on his shoulders on "Winter Lady," we're sure you'll find the finest sounds of the cold snap right here.