Lionheart - Reviewed August 2020

She has been active as a singer and songwriter for twenty years, she has been recording for 15 years and since then she has delivered ten different copies. We are talking about Canadian singer-songwriter Lynn Jackson from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario who recently released her eleventh album under the telling title “Lionheart”.

It contains twelve songs, eleven of which she has provided with lyrics and music, and one has added one cover version of John Lennon's classic “Working Class Hero”. In addition, she has also written the song “The Sound Of Everything” as a tribute to one of her greatest examples and musical influences, most notably her compatriot Leonard Cohen, who died in November 2016.

“Lionheart” opens with a real roots rock song “Running It Down”, which is followed by the folk song “Stormy Eyes”, brought in an acoustic version.

Lynn Jackson is mainly known for her acoustic work, but on all her previous records she almost always added some more spaciously orchestrated songs. Here she does the same in the crescendo growing album title track “Lionheart” as well as in the solid rocking song “Sometimes It's OK”. That is also the case in the swinging “Cobwebs” that we hear in two versions on this album: one with 'dirty' lyrics and another version without dirty words to make the song similar to Lou Reed's work suitable for airplay. on the radio stations.

But the vast majority of the songs on this record remain minimally orchestrated or stick to a subtle instrumental accompaniment, eg in the songs “Flight”, “Everything & Nothing”, “Used To”, “Sometimes” and the intimate cover version of Working Class Hero.

Lynn Jackson's self-produced “Lionheart” is the follow-up to the 2017 album “Follow That Fire” for which “Cowboy Junkies” guitarist Michael Timmins had taken the producer's seat. For the recording of this album, Lynn Jackson selected some local instrumentalists for the accompanying sound with Scott Fitzpatrick on bass guitar and Jonny Sauder on drums. Chris Boyne and Silvia DiDonato played keyboards, Don Featherstone on saxophone, Alison Corbett and Wendy Wright on violins, Rob Deyman and John Stuart on electric guitar and Chris Colvin and the three ladies from "The Divines" provided backing vocals.