50 Best Canadian Musicians Of All Time - Rolling Stone

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From its sweet-ass health care system to its foxy nepo-baby prime minister to its absolutely banging national anthem, Canada has always had it going on. Sure, this hellish summer-wildfire shit has kind of been an unexpected plot twist — but no country is perfect, right? 

Canada has about a tenth the population of the United States, which only makes its outsize impact on the history of music that much more incredible (excellent arts-education funding, eh?). The stats here are astounding. Three of the five or so greatest songwriters who ever lived are from Canada, as is the most beloved prog-rock band, most significant country singer of the Nineties, the biggest hip-hop artist of the past 20 years, and the quintessential R&B star of our era. Get this: the greatest Americana roots rock band of all time? You guessed it: Canadian! (Well, four fifths at least.)

To honor Canada Day, here is the CanCon our friends in the Great White North deserve: Rolling Stone’s definitive rundown of the greatest Canadian artists in the history of pop music. Is every single significant Canadian musician on here? Nope. The 50 we like the most are, though. There’s a lot of Canada out there. So, please allow us to preemptively extend our sincere and respectful condolences to members and fans of the Cowboy Junkies, DeadMau5, Skinny Puppy, the Pointed Sticks, Voivod, Bran Van 300, Buck 65, Chilliwack, the Waekerthans, Toronto, and many other very worthy acts. But not Nickelback. We have zero condolences for Nickelback.

• Snow

  

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  If Snow had never done anything other than be a reggae-influenced Canadian rapper named Snow, it would be enough to wholly solidify his historical legacy. An Irish Canadian kid from Toronto who got into reggae via his Jamaican immigrant neighbors, Darrin O’Brien took on his outrageously brilliant stagenname and made his debut LP, 12 Inches of Snow, in 1992. Upon the album’s release, he was doing jail time for his involvement in a brawl, but when he got out his wonderful one-hit-wonder juggernaut “The Informer” was a massive, if somewhat unlikely, worldwide hit. A fun hip-hop/reggae jam perfectly fit the casually eclectic vibe of the hey-whatever Nineties, and its culture-bridging legacy remains strong. In 2019, reggaeton king Daddy Yankee brought Snow on for “Con Calma,” a “The Informer”-tinged hit that was nominated for a Latin Grammy. —J.D.

• Martha and the Muffins

  

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  Martha and the Muffins blew out of Toronto’s New Wave scene with their classic 1980 club hit “Echo Beach.” Martha Johnson sings in the relatable voice of an office clerk, bored at her 9-to-5 job, fantasizing of a romantic beach escape all by herself, over herky-jerky guitar/synth churn. These Muffins had other excellent hits with extremely New Wave titles: “Women Around the World At Work,” “Several Styles of Blonde Girls Dancing,” and the anthem “Be Blasé.” But their finest moment came in 1984, when they shortened their name to M+M and dropped the 12-inch bombshell “Black Stations/White Stations,” a prescient attack on Eighties radio segregation, with the party chant: “Black stations, white stations, get on the floor/Stand up and face the music, this is 1984!” They were so ahead of their time. —R.S.

• Terri Clark

  

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  The much-revered era of Nineties country just wouldn’t have been the same without the contributions of Terri Clark. The Alberta-born singer got her start playing for tips (and a $15 flat rate) at Nashville’s famous honky-tonk Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in 1987, and raced into the Top Three just a few years later with her 1995 debut single, “Better Things to Do.” With a powerful voice and a cowgirl swagger, Clark was a more rough-hewn counterpoint to Nineties vixens like Shania Twain and Faith Hill — brave enough to cover Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and, like Linda Ronstadt before her, turn it into a hit. She carried that momentum into the 2000s too with radio staples like “I Wanna Do It All” and “Girls Lie Too.” There’s a good reason Reba chose her to open her recent tour: Clark rules. —J.H.

• April Wine

  

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  Pioneering arena rockers April Wine moved from Halifax to Montreal at the start of the Seventies, and then spent the rest of the decade churning out tuneful, middle-of-the-road rock hits, alternating between sentimental, keyboard-sweetened love songs, and upbeat, guitar-heavy love songs. The band enjoyed a number of firsts — their fourth album, Stand Back, was the first Canadian album to sell 100,000 units; they were also the first Canadian band to gross $1 million from a single tour — but of the 10 Juno nominations the band accumulated, there was not a single winner. As singer Myles Goodwyn later admitted, “I’ve written so much god-awful crap it’s ridiculous.” —J.D.C.

• Daniel Caesar

  

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  The covers of Daniel Caesar’s LPs are a helpful framework for understanding the Torontonian’s music. 2017’s Freudian shows Caesar climbing up the side of a monument; on 2019’s Case Study 01 and this year’s Never Enough, he’s blurred, mid-action, moving but unhurried. His music, when it focuses, can be rapturous, netting Grammy noms for slow-blooming torch songs like “Best Part” and “Get You.” But those moments are idylls for a musician whose music seems to wander from relationship to relationship, place to place, mood to mood. Like those album covers, his music captures him in an act of searching.” —C.P.

• Barenaked Ladies

  

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  Hailing from Scarborough, the same Toronto suburb that gave the world Mike Myers, BNL emerged in the early Nineties as a tuneful, self-effacing alternative to college-rock cool. Coming on like a cross between Lennon and McCartney and Doug and Bob McKenzie, frontmen Steven Page and Ed Robertson parodied pop-song tropes even as they quietly embraced them, an approach that hit its apex with the 1998 earworm “One Week.” The two fell out in the aughts, sparked both by a royalties dispute over the theme to Big Bang Theory and, later, Page’s 2008 arrest on cocaine charges. Page departed in 2009, returning only for a “one-time” reunion at the 2018 Juno Awards. —J.D.C.

• Death From Above 1979

  

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  At the peak of the early 2000s disco-punk revival, Death From Above 1979 stormed down from Toronto with an especially noisy take on the genre, since the lineup was just a drummer and a bassist-vocalist using guitar distortion. Their 2004 album, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, featured an illustration of the duo with elephant trunks instead of noses on the cover, and the music felt like an elephant dance party. They broke up a couple of years later, and bassist-vocalist Jesse F. Keeler formed the electro-focused Msterkrft. He reunited with drummer Sebastian Grainger in 2011 and now splits duties between Msterkrft and rumbling the earth with DFA79 on three reunion albums. —K.G.

• Sum 41

  

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  Formed during a 1996 summer vacation from high school, Sum 41 hit big with the sneering, mosh-pit-ready rock-rap earworm “Fat Lip” in 2001, and rode the Warped Tour wave to more radio and MTV success over the course of a decade. The Ajax, Ontario, band — which announced its breakup in May, after 27 years — often resisted the “punk” tag, and with good reason; on later records, they augmented punk’s three-chords-and-the-truth building blocks with flourishes of piano and prog-rock ambition, while their massive riffs were clearly the result of their closely studying metal’s stadium-shaking sonics. —M.J.

• Peaches

  

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  Blending the in-your-face attitude of punk with the hard-hitting beats of 21st-century electro and a grad seminar’s worth of gender theory, Toronto’s Peaches has been putting forth an ever-evolving art project that’s as confrontational as it is catchy. “Fuck the Pain Away,” the 2000 single that updated L’Trimm for the electroclash age, remains as head-swiveling a cut as ever two-plus decades after its release, thanks to Peaches’ brash delivery and incessant dime-store-synth beat. She’s brought her sex-positive, humor-laced brand of feminism to TV shows like OrphanBlack and records by Christina Aguilera and P!nk, pushing forward pop in her own way. —M.J.   

• Metric

  

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  While members of Metric have lived in both Canada and stateside, Toronto is their base and a part of the band’s fabric. Emily Haines and James Shaw met in that city and formed the band more than two decades ago, and several of their eight studio albums were recorded at Shaw’s Giant Studios in Toronto. They are also part of Broken Social Scene’s musical collective (Haines takes the lead on the beloved indie classic “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.”). Together with Joshua Winstead and Joules Scott-Key, their New Wave-tinged music — like the propulsive “Gold Guns Girls” and “Black Sheep” — has earned them Juno Awards and flavored soundtracks. At the center of their sound is Haines’ versatile singing, which can range from ethereal and sultry to soaring, empowering the lyrics she’s written for Metric, other artists, and her own piano-buoyed solo work. —A.L.

• k.d. lang

  

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  Few singers are as chameleonic and casually flamboyant as Alberta’s k.d. lang. Purporting to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, lang filled her early work with a heady mix of country classicism and camp theatricality. She proved her Nashville bona fides with 1988’s Shadowland, and then alienated the Nashville mainstream by first coming out against meat, and then simply coming out. But rather than a career impediment, lang’s individualism enhanced her pop appeal — that, plus the fact that she could sing pretty much anything, from effervescent pop confections like “Constant Craving” to jazz standards with Tony Bennett. —J.D.C.

• PartyNextDoor

  

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  Emerging from the molly-drenched miasma of early-2010s Toronto, PartyNextDoor cuts a familiar figure across his first few releases: a brokenhearted lothario prowling apartment complexes and nightclubs at vampire hours, looking for any stimulation that’ll keep the pain — or at least the withdrawal — at bay. The difference is that PartyNextDoor was one of the architects of this style. Born Jahron Brathwaite, he had a songwriting deal at 18, establishing a behind-the-scenes presence across Drake’s imperial era and a handful of the best tracks on Rihanna’s Anti. He’s at his best in these contexts, but his solo LPs provide room for his rangiest productions, full of dreamlike EDM flourishes and half-remembered island percussion. —C.P.

• D.O.A.

  

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  When punk’s first wave started fizzling out, D.O.A. burst out of Vancouver playing faster than the Sex Pistols and the Ramones combined, and snarling with the same contempt for society as like-minded L.A. hardcore bands Black Flag and the Germs. Where they differed, though, was in frontman Joey Shithead’s calls for social change, which set their Hardcore 81 album apart from those of their peers; one of their mottoes was “Talk Minus Action Equals Zero.” Their music influenced everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Green Day to Pearl Jam, and their band’s DIY van tours inspired Black Flag and Minor Threat to get on the road. Drummer Chuck Biscuits later went on to join Danzig, while Shithead unsurprisingly went into politics (while keeping D.O.A. going). —K.G.

• Alessia Cara

  

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  Brampton-raised Alessia Cara — the first Canadian to win the Best New Artist Grammy — made a big splash with her debut single, “Here,” a wallflower chronicle that twisted a sample of Issac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II” into a stormy soundtrack for teenage alienation. Her sweet-and-sour alto was an ideal foil for 2010s pop savants like Zedd and Troye Sivan, while her presence on Logic’s 2017 anti-suicide smash “1-800-273-8255” — where she played the sympathetic operator who answered the desperate Logic’s call — cemented her status as a pop hero for those who felt left behind. Cara has taken that responsibility seriously in both her soulful music and her offstage activism. —M.J.   

• Broken Social Scene

  

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  Born out of a collaboration between Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning in 1999, Broken Social Scene’s revolving-door approach to music helped highlight a new generation of major artists from Toronto. The collective includes Feist and members of Stars and Metric, among others, uplifting all of their individual projects in the process. BSS has even recently included cameos from Meryl Streep and Tracey Ullman. The band has been touring on the 20th anniversary of its breakout sophomore album, You Forgot It in People — and over the past two decades, its music has endured. Album standout “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” remains a beloved indie-rock staple (and the anchor of memes); its indelible line “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” continues to resonate for a new generation. —A.L. 

• Nelly Furtado

  

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  In 2000, this Victoria-born singer-songwriter broke through with “I’m Like a Bird,” a regret-tinged anthem for the liberated woman. While that chiming track was very in tune with the pop trends of the early aughts, over the years Furtado proved herself to be as free from genre conventions as “Bird” might suggest. She appeared on tracks by hip-hop collective Jurassic 5 and DJ Paul Oakenfold in 2002, and the following year she released Folklore, which touched on her Portugese heritage; Loose, released in 2006, was a forward-thinking dance-pop record produced by Timbaland, and Furtado’s sample gave an edge to beat-heavy cuts like the wistful “Say It Right” and the saucy “Promiscuous.” 2017’s The Ride amalgamated those past sounds into a slick, hooky collection that she called her “hangover album.” —M.J.

• Anne Murray

  

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  Before there was Shania Twain, there was Anne Murray, who crossed over from country to pop in the early Seventies and became one of the biggest stars of Adult Contemporary radio. Born in Nova Scotia, she earned national attention in Canada through CBC Television, but it was the million-seller “Snowbird” (1970) that made her name in the U.S. Despite consistent success on the American charts in the Seventies and Eighties (notably the chart-topping ballad “You Needed Me” in 1978), Murray remained based in Canada. Her final album was a collection of duets with the likes of Celine Dion and Nelly Furtado, and she officially retired from music after a farewell concert in 2008. —J.D.C.

• Richie Hawtin

  

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  Richie Hawtin moved to Windsor, Ontario, from the U.K. when he was young, a computer wiz who fell in love with the techno scene in nearby Detroit, DJ’ing and eventually releasing records on his Plus 8 label. Hawtin mixed a minimalist approach to music with a smart marketing sense to turn his Plastikman releases into international successes. Hawtin’s music can be foreboding and spartan, but tracks like his career-making nine-minute 1993 classic, “Spastik,” have a raw, pulsing off-kilter energy. “I remember when ‘Spastik’ came out, people were like, ‘It’s fucking just snares,’” he said of the track years later. “And then others thought it was the best thing they’d ever heard.” His forays into deeper abstraction (like 1998’s more ethereal Consumed) have been equally divisive, but there’s no denying his music’s subtle, almost subliminal pull. —J.D.

• Loverboy

  

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  Spandex existed long before Loverboy did, but it took these Eighties arena-rock pinup boys to perfect it. The Calgary studs knew how to work a red leather catsuit and a mega-cheese guitar riff with the high-pitched sex moans of singer Mike Reno. They won a huge audience full of girls wearing headbands and leg warmers. Loverboy rocked countless proms with bangers like “Working for the Weekend” and “Lady of the 80’s,” but their moment of genius was “Hot Girls in Love,” from the Hot Girl Summer of 1983. “We don’t pull our pants down like Jim Morrison did,” guitarist Paul Dean told Rolling Stone. He explained their music by saying, “It’s like a beer commercial.” Rival bands were jealous of the fangirl love — the singer in Quiet Riot sneered to Rolling Stone, “When Loverboy get offstage, they put on their Lacoste shirts and play tennis.” But Loverboy are still killing it on the road to this day, and still taking fans to (almost) paradise. —R.S.

• Godspeed You! Black Emperor

  

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  Given to abstract soundscapes, long, slow-shifting drones, and recurring clouds of feedback guitar, Godspeed You! Black Emperor are hardly the most commercial rock group to have come out of Montreal, but that’s kind of the point. According to its label, Constellation Records, the group declines to engage in self-promotion to the point of eschewing music videos and social media, and sees its lengthy instrumentals as a form of protest music, “soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance.” In 2013, GY!BE won the Polaris Music Prize, for the album ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND! In response, the group complained that the corporate-sponsored Polaris gala amounted to “lazy money patting itself on the back.” —J.D.C.

• Bryan Adams

  

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  Given his standing as an icon of Eighties rock radio, it’s kind of surprising to note that Bryan Adams first entered the charts with a disco record, the minor Canadian hit, “Let Me Take You Dancing.” But Adams was always more a journeyman than a genre purist, and his gritty tenor was as suited to retro rockers like “The Summer of ’69” as to brooding New Wave tracks such as “Run to You,” or sexy-riff rockers like the Tina Turner collaboration “It’s Only Love.” But his biggest hits were unabashedly sentimental power ballads like “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman” and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” songs that exploited his Rod Stewart rasp without pushing beyond anything the average Joe couldn’t sing at karaoke. —J.D.C.

• Alvvays

  

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  When Alvvays busted out into the indie-pop scene with their 2014 self-titled, no-skips debut, the general reaction was “Why is this so good and where did it come from?” Canada, baby. Lead singer Molly Rankin grew up in the Rankin Family folk group, then formed Alvvays in 2011. Their Canadian traces are everywhere, particularly on their recent album Blue Rev, named after an alcoholic beverage Rankin drank as a teenager, which features an old photo of her family on the album cover. “I find it really fun to make these tiny little movies in my mind,” she told Rolling Stone last year. “I’m a pretty sensitive person, so I feel a lot of feelings, and I try and channel that into the little scenarios that I make. But I don’t feel like my life is all that wild or exciting. To me, it’s more entertaining to create a different universe.” —A.M.

• Buffy Sainte-Marie

  

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  Buffy Sainte-Marie has worn many hats — singer, activist, educator, actor — but it’s as a songwriter that she has made her greatest mark. Born in Saskatchewan but raised by adoptive parents in the U.S., Sainte-Marie gravitated to the New York folk scene in the early Sixties, where an impressed Bob Dylan urged her to play at folkie epicenter the Gaslight. A record deal soon followed, but it took a cover by Donovan to make her anti-war anthem “Universal Soldier” a hit. Because of her activism, Sainte-Marie’s recordings were blacklisted on the U.S. radio, and many of her biggest songs were made famous by other singers, most notably “Up Where You Belong” from the film An Officer and a Gentleman. Nonetheless, she has remained active as a recording artist and won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize for her 2015 album, Power in the Blood. —J.D.C.

• Shawn Mendes

  

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  Shawn Mendes first caught the world’s attention when he began posting covers to YouTube and Vine (including a clip of him singing fellow Canadian Justin Bieber’s “As Long as You Love Me”). He was soon signed to a record deal and quickly took his following from online to IRL, amassing multiplatinum albums and three Grammy nominations in the years since. Like Bieber, Mendes assumed the “Canadian heartthrob” mantle in his teenage years, but the Pickering, Ontario, native has grown into his musicality in the same way that he’s grown into his looks. As he told Rolling Stone earlier this year, he just needed time to find himself. Now, Mendes has become a well-respected artist, with songs that are at once intimate and anthemic, and introspective lyrics that are as urgent and poignant as anything out there today. Well-liked, well-spoken, and well-accomplished? Well, there’s nothing more Canadian than that. —T.C.

• The Guess Who

  

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  The Guess Who declared war on the U.S.A. with their 1970 broadside “American Woman.” Imagine their surprise when it turned out American women loved this song — it hit Number One and ended up as Taylor Swift’s walk-on anthem for the Red tour. These Winnipeg dudes, led by singer Burton Cummings and guitarist Randy Bachman, were blue-collar rockers with hits like “Share the Land,” “Undun,” and the underrated “Hand Me Down World,” as well as their tribute to their homeland, “Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon.” (Note: Damn right we’re counting Bachman-Turner Overdrive as a Guess Who offshoot, since Bachman was flying the same flag in “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” When he rejoined his old mates, they proudly played BTO hits as their own.) In the summer of 2003, after Toronto was devastated by the SARS epidemic, they played a star-studded benefit in Downsview Park for 500,000 fans, every damn one of whom was screaming along to “American Woman.” —R.S.

• Japandroids

  

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  Along with the excellent White Lung and others, the guitar-drums two-piece Japandroids helped bring the underground rock scene in Vancouver to wide attention during the early 2010s. On albums like 2009’s Post-Nothing and 2012’s Celebration Rock, the duo of Brian King and David Prowse mixed big noise and bigger anthems, almost like they were looking for the median point between Hüsker Dü and the Replacements. They wore their patriotism passionately on 2017’s “North East South West,” on which King sang, “And no matter how much I fan the flames/Canada always answers when I call her name.” It’s impossible to imagine an American punk singing about America with anything other than contempt or irony. These dudes celebrated their home and native land the same way they do everything else: with their pure hearts beautifully ablaze —J.D.

• Sarah McLachlan

  

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  Halifax-born Sarah McLachlan has blazed multiple trails since debuting with the gauzy Touch at age 19. Songs like the sighing “Adia” and the yearning “Possession” are among the Nineties’ most-cherished singer-songwriter cuts, while her stirring ballad “Angel” is a moving portrait of trying to quiet a whirling mind. Her spearheading of the all-female-acts lollapalooza Lilith Fair in 1997 gave a new dimension to the discussion about “women in rock,” and its legacy still looms large today. In addition to her on-record achievements, McLachlan, who hosted the Juno Awards in 2019, is also dedicated to spreading her wealth of musical knowledge: In 2002, she founded the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, which gives free classes in performing, songwriting, and other musical topics to at-risk youth. —M.J.

• Destroyer

  

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  Most bands have a sound. Destroyer has a concept. As Dan Bejar, the band’s Vancouver-based frontman and founder, put it, the goal with each Destroyer album is “to start from scratch every time.” It’s never a complete reinvention — Bejar’s self-consciously literary lyrics and half-sung vocals are a constant — but it covers quiet a lot of territory: from the amateurish low-fi of City of Daughters to the semi-polished guitar pop of Streethawk to the mock-jazz of Kaputt to the lush, string-laden arrangements of Poison Season to the groove-heavy sound of Labyrinthitis. Although critical favorites, the public at large has yet to embrace Destroyer’s everchanging sound. —J.D.C.

• Avril Lavigne

  

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   At just 17 years old, Avril Lavigne dominated the poppier side of the early-2000s pop-punk scene with her massive debut, Let Go, the bestselling album of the 21st century by a Canadian artist. Angsty anthems like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi” secured the Ontario-born singer’s status as the “pop-punk princess,” and paved the way for young women to claim space in the genre’s reemergence. Throughout all of her mainstream success, Lavigne has embraced her Canadian roots; she even big-upped her home of “small-town Napanee“ on the Let Go track “My World.” Lavigne kept churning pop-rock gems on subsequent records like Under My Skin and The Best Damn Thing, while her 2002 LP, Luv Sux, was one of her best-reviewed albums yet. Despite the singer’s global success, she’s still a Canadian at heart. Just last year, Lavigne informed Entertainment Tonight Canada of her plans to immediately hit the Tim Horton’s drive-thru as soon as she began the Canadian leg of her most recent tour. Her TH order? An iced cappuccino and Timbits. —M.G.

• Feist

  

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  There are worse doors to stardom than an Apple ad. In the spring of 2007, Leslie Fiest — who, after moving from Calgary to Toronto, used only her surname — released her third album, The Reminder, to enthusiastic if modest acclaim. Though its predecessor, Let It Die, netted her a Juno for Best New Artist, and her work with Broken Social Scene marked her as a singer to watch, it was an iPod Nano ad that turned the gentle “1, 2, 3, 4” into a sensation, making The Reminder a multimillio-selling smash. To her credit, Fiest maintained her indie-pop course despite such success, variously collaborating with Mastodon and the Constantines, and retaining her quirky Joni Mitchell-meets-Kate Bush vibe through three subsequent albums. —J.D.C.

• Sloan

  

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  Eagerly dubbed “the new Seattle” by the Canadian music press, the Halifax scene of the early Nineties was a hotbed of jangly guitars, close-harmony singing, and bright, Beatlesque melodies, and nobody typified those qualities more completely than Sloan. Each of the band’s four members writes and sings, and the band’s power-pop-inflected sound has remained remarkably consistent across the its 13-album history. Although their sales have never pushed beyond gold-record status in Canada, the quartet continue to be a critical favorite, with Chart magazine naming their second album, Twice Removed, the Best Canadian Album of All Time. —J.D.C.

• Hank Snow

  

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  One of the all-time great country legends was the boy from Brooklyn, Nova Scotia. Hank Snow grew up in the toughest days of the Depression, running off to sea on a fishing boat and starting out his country career as “Hank the Yodeling Ranger.” He sang his tales of the open road in the voice of someone who’d spent his life there: “I’m Moving On,” “The Golden Rocket,” “I’ve Been Everywhere.” But you can hear Nova Scotia in his voice on stoic ballads like “Wedding Bells.” Ray Charles and Johnny Cash idolized him. Bob Dylan loved to sing Hank Snow tunes with the Band at the Basement Tapes sessions in Big Pink. Hank paid respects to his roots on records like My Nova Scotia Home. His final album was one of his best: Brand on My Heart, a 1985 collabo with a young fan named Willie Nelson. —R.S.

• The Tragically Hip

  

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  Often described as “the most Canadian band in the world,” the Tragically Hip’s popularity is almost incomprehensible to those outside of Canada. Formed in Kingston, Ontario, in 1983, the Hip cut their teeth on the Ontario bar circuit, and even as the band moved from clubs to arenas, the music never lost its unpretentious grit. At the same time, Gord Downie’s witty, allusive lyrics offered enough high-brow Canadiana that even Margaret Atwood was a fan. After Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2016, the Hip’s final tour climaxed with a national broadcast of the farewell show in Kingston. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put it, the Hip were “an essential part of what we are and who we are as a country.” —J.D.C.

• Justin Bieber

  

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  A truly homegrown pop sensation — he was discovered by manager Scooter Braun thanks to YouTube covers he recorded in his Stratford, Ontario, house — Justin Bieber has grown from fawned-over teen idol to adult singer-songwriter able to work in any style that might come up on a shuffled playlist. While his sweetly youthful voice made early tracks like “Baby” spun-candy confections, his maturing instrument has helped him remain a compelling presence, whether as a solo artist or alongside fellow top-tier belters like Ariana Grande and Ed Sheeran. Bieber’s openness about his medical issues, including depression and Ramsay Hunt syndrome, has also made him a standard-bearer for pop transparency and someone who’s made people suffering from similar maladies feel less alone. —M.J.

• Kate and Anna McGarrigle

  

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  Arriving in the mid-1970s with two brilliant albums — 1975’s Kare & Anna McGarrigle and 1977’s Dancer With Bruised Knees — the McGarrigle sisters are one of the all-time great folk-pop duos, combining homespun warmth with bittersweet beauty and a fun sense of irony. Linda Ronstadt’s hit cover of their classic song “Heart Like a Wheel” helped bring their music to a wider audience, and they’ve always repped their hometown of Montreal with pride (including singing in French on a number of songs, like their knockout cover of Bob Seger’s “You’ll Accompany Me,” from 1982’s Love Over and Over). In the 1990s, Kate’s children, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, began their musical careers, and appeared along with artists like Emmylou Harris and Ronstadt on wonderful albums like The McGarrigle Hour and The McGarrigle Christmas Hour. —J.D.

• New Pornographers

  

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  You could make a case for the New Pornographers as one of the all-time great power pop bands. Formed in Vancouver in the late Nineties and arriving on the scene with their perfect 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, they’ve kept evolving for almost a quarter century. The band’s original lineup had three powerhouse talents in impressionistic popcraft whiz Carl Newman, the playfully recondite Dan Bejar (also of Destroyer), and super-gifted alt-country singer Neko Case; over their nine-album career they’ve never stayed stuck in one sound or set of references while continually maintaining their core sense of joy and discovery. “It’s always a shock to me,” Newman told Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield in 2021. “I remember before Mass Romantic came out, we were talking to Mint Records. They mentioned a second record. I was like, ‘A second record?’ It never even popped into my head that we would make a second record.” —J.D.

• Carly Rae Jepsen

  

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  Long before she stormed the charts with “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen was a small-town folk singer best known for making it to the finals of Canadian Idol. But in three minutes and 13 seconds of pure pop bliss, the Mission, British Columbia, native became a household name the world over, setting herself on a trajectory as bright and shiny as her signature track. The singer-songwriter has turned her viral hit into a critically acclaimed career that’s now six albums in. Jepsen found her sweet spot in making nostalgia-tinged synth-pop, with inventive melodies and clever lyrics that mix a cheeky naughtiness with aww-shucks Canadian charm. While she’s endeared herself to millions of fans around the world, Jepsen has also found a fervent fanbase in the LGBTQ community, with her songs serving as both a call to arms and a call to the dance floor. She may not have taken home the Idol title, but just call Jepsen the Canadian-people’s champ. —T.C.

• Tegan and Sara

  

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  Twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin have been making music together since they were 15-year-olds writing and recording “plunk” — that’s Quin for “light punk” — in their Calgary basement. Over the years, their approach to pop has shape-shifted, but the potency of their pointed melodies, enhanced by the sort of blood harmonies that can only come from sisters, has only increased, with songs like the insistent “Back in Your Head” and the plush yet anxious “Closer” holding their own on 21st-century best-song lists. When not recording, writing memoirs, or executive-producing the autobiographical series High School, Tegan and Sara have also been active advocates for LGBTQ rights, forming the Tegan and Sara Foundation and helping put together a health care directory for LGBTQ patients. —M.J.  

• Arcade Fire

  

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  “So many of my closest friends are in Montreal,” the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler said in 2022. “There’s such a magical interplay between Haitian, Caribbean, West and North African cultures, with Québécois, Canadians, and Americans, such a cool, interesting mix of people. It’s cultural, it’s food, and just the humanity.” The band has definitely done its part to bring that culture to the world. When Arcade Fire debuted with their classic album, Funeral, in 2004, they immediately shifted the attention of the rock audience to their home country, which was rich with great new indie-rock bands. Arcade Fire’s sound has moved on from the charismatic rock of Funeral to dance rock and other strains, but they’ve always maintained their hugely influential earnest intensity. Despite troubling accusations of abuse and toxic behavior against Win Bulter and the recent departure of co-founder Will Butler, the band toured in 2022 and 2023 behind its sixth album WE. —J.D.

• Gordon Lightfoot

  

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  Gordon Lightfoot has yet to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He never won a single Grammy. Classic-rock radio has reduced his five-decade career to two or three songs it occasionally broadcasts. But if you bring up his name to any truly great songwriter with a knowledge of history, they’ll tell you that the man was an absolute genius. “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like,” Bob Dylan once said. “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Dylan recorded Lightfoot’s classic “Early Mornin’ Rain,” joining a long list of others — including Elvis Presley, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, and Barbra Streisand — who covered his music. When he died in 2023, tributes poured in. “Gordon was a great Canadian artist,” Neil Young wrote. “A songwriter without parallel.” —A.G.

• Celine Dion

  

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  Few artists are as beloved in Canada as Celine Dion, and for good reason: Her rags-to-riches story (youngest of 14 from a working-class family in small-town Quebec turns into global superstar) is the stuff of pop-music dreams, and the respect and adoration she receives around the world is something Canadians claim with pride. The Francophone Dion got her start singing in Canada’s other official language, releasing eight successful French albums before her English debut in 1990. Determined to make a name for herself internationally, she took lessons to improve her English while working with bigger producers and bigger stars. Her enormous career is undeniable, spanning Number One singles, countless awards, and one Titanic moment. Her voice is unmissable, a roaring tour de force, and she has stage presence to back it up. Yet through it all, Dion will tell you her greatest accomplishment was making her family — and her country — proud. And for that, our love for Celine will go on. —T.C.

• Alanis Morissette

  

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  With her lacerating wail and ability to distill complex feelings into a single lyric — “And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it,” from her 1995 breakthrough single “You Oughta Know,” is worthy of greeting-card inscriptions — Ottawa’s Alanis Morissette got her start in comedy, dishing out wisecracks on the Canadian sketch show You Can’t Do That on Television. Her early-career efforts at teen pop were well-received in Canada, but 1995’s Jagged Little Pill, which combined alt-rock scuzz with her mighty voice and shrewd observations, broke her worldwide. Over time, Morissette became interested in spirituality and anti-censorship efforts, and she even released the meditation album the storm before the calm in 2022. Going her own way, of course, fits into her legacy as a woman unafraid to speak her truth, which was even enshrined on Broadway in the Diablo Cody-written jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill. —M.J.

• The Weeknd

  

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  When the Weeknd released his first mixtapes in the early 2010s, not much was known about the shadowy singer — although it was very clear from the jump that he was a product of The 6. Those hazy, winding early songs led to him hooking up with fellow Toronto ambassador Drake, and things went all the way up from there. Abel Tesfaye’s lithe voice and melding of the dark arts with the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll trilogy, along with some assists from top-tier producers like Max Martin and Daft Punk, catapulted him into pop’s highest echelons in the mid-2010s, He was so big, in 2021 he became the first Canadian solo artist to headline a Super Bowl Halftime Show. —M.J. 

• Shania Twain

  

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  Country-pop megastar Shania Twain might have sold more than 100 million albums, but the Windsor-born singer is still true to her roots. “Northern Ontario is unique,” she told Maclean’s in 2002. “I don’t know whether it’s just because I’m from there, but I just have a connection.” Twain has also established connections with listeners all over the globe thanks to her flouting of Nashville convention, as well as her easy fusing of country’s twang-rich storytelling with big-tent arena rock’s brawn. Songs like “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much” are party-starters for even those people who might disavow country in their music-taste rundowns, while tender ballads like “You’re Still the One” tug at the heartstrings decades after their release. —M.J.

• The Band

  

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  The Band may be the quintessential Americana rock band, but four of the five members were born and raised in Canada. Guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and organist Garth Hudson immersed themselves in American music from very young ages, making them the perfect choice to join up with Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins as his backing musicians in the late Fifties. Once Arkansas-born Levon Helm joined on drums, the classic lineup was complete. Bob Dylan upped their profile considerably when he took them on the road in 1965, and they finally had a chance to release a proper record in 1968 with Music From Big Pink, a staggering masterpiece they managed to top a year later with The Band. Only an outsider to our country like Robertson could have written the Civil War epic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which tells the story of the war from the perspective of an impoverished Southerner. “You couldn’t categorize the Band’s sound,” said Lucinda Williams. “But it was so organic — a little bit country, a little bit mountain, a little bit rock — and their vocal styles and harmonies set them apart.” —A.G.

• Drake

  

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  Drake’s sadboi flow, frosty beats, and oversharing intensity completely transformed the emotional and sonic language of hip-hop, and his Canadian background definitely has definitely contributed to his isolated allure, especially early on. Over the years, Drake has made “runnin’ through the 6 with my woes” a kind of epic drama. Toronto isn’t just a backdrop to the 6 God’s music, it’s a character. He evokes his favorite spots, streets from his past, the city’s weather, its housing projects, its transit system, even the simple thrill of flying into YYZ airport after being away awhile. “Been flowin’ stupid since Vince Carter was on some through the legs, arm in the hoop shit,” he rapped on “Weston Road Flows,” where the memory of not having enough pennies to buy pizza is balanced against brags about topping the charts. If we didn’t know where Drizzy was from, watching his rise might’ve been much less interesting. —J.D. 

• Leonard Cohen

  

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  The Montreal poet came from the land of the ice and snow in the Summer of Love, born with the gift of a golden voice that has seduced winter ladies ever since. Leonard Cohen turned the Great White North into his Tower of Song. He was well into his thirties when he dropped his 1967 debut, drawing on the ritual traditions of Jewish Montreal. In the most Canadian rock romance of all time, he told Joni Mitchell he was “constant as the Northern Star”— slightly exaggerating his skill at fidelity. But they both got classic songs out of it — she wrote “A Case of You” and he wrote “Joan of Arc.” Cohen wandered from Greek islands to Zen Buddhist monasteries to the Chelsea Hotel, running for the money and the flesh, especially the flesh. He gave the world “Hallelujah,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Anthem,” “Treaty,” “Avalanche,” and his original love song to his hometown, “Suzanne.” (“I knew it was a song about Montreal,” he told the BBC in 1994.) He kept writing brilliant tunes into his eighties, right up to his 2016 farewell, You Want It Darker, murmuring his vocals from a wheelchair, signing off with one final “sincerely, L. Cohen.” His voice will sigh eternally. —R.S.

• Rush

  

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  No band from the U.S. or U.K. was bold enough to fuse metal and prog in the Seventies — to achieve that glorious fusion, we needed a trio from the great land of Canada. If there was something intrinsically Canadian about the work of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and the late Neil Peart, it was the way they let their extraordinary music overshadow their personalities, playing some of rock’s most showoff-y parts without ever evincing any ego. When Lifeson soloed — think “Limelight” — Peart and Lee would often manage to slip in their own solos underneath him. Rush’s proggiest days were in the Seventies, but they never stopped innovating — their synth-y Eighties work holds up as a world of its own — never lost their senses of humor, and never performed at anything less than the peak of their abilities. —B.H.

• Neil Young

  

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  Young left Canada in 1966, when he famously drove his Pontiac hearse illegally across the U.S. border and never turned back. “The great Canadian dream is to get out,” he told us in 1979. It would take him more than five decades to get his U.S. citizenship, due to a 1968 drug bust and President Trump’s tight immigration policy for the delay. But we know his love for his home country also played a role, as heard in gems like “Helpless,” “Ambulance Blues,” “Journey Through the Past,” and “Far From Home.” (The best example is the Time Fades Away deep cut “Don’t Be Denied,” which includes lines about his father Scott Young, a famous Canadian sports journalist and author.) Some of his most beloved and intimate shows have taken place there, like Massey Hall in 1971 and Omemee in 2017. And even on his most L.A. rock moments, the love for his home shines through. Ever thought about the dog on the cover of 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere? Its name was Winnipeg. —A.M.

• Joni Mitchell

  

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  “It’s a long way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Carnegie Hall!” Joni Mitchell told the New York crowd on Feb. 1, 1969. She hadn’t been in the states very long, but soon she would become so immersed in the West Coast singer-songwriter scene that casual fans wouldn’t even realize she was Canadian. And like her old pal Neil Young — who, as a child, suffered from the same Canadian polio outbreak as Mitchell, and wrote “Sweet Joni” about a girl from Saskatoon — she’d always return to her roots. Most obvious is “A Case of You,” where she sings “I drew a map of Canada/Oh, Canada/With your face sketched on it twice” (for fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen). Then there’s 1972’s For the Roses, a perfect album Mitchell crafted in British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, recovering from the burst of stardom Blue brought her. She eventually returned to L.A., but never lost sight of her home country. In 1979, deep into her career, she reflected on her early years spent in Canadian coffeehouses. “None of us had any grandiose ideas about the kind of success that we received,” she told Rolling Stone. “In those days it was really a long shot. Especially for a Canadian.” —A.M.

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