The Very Best of Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers' recording career was not long — just over a dozen years, from 1969 to 1983 — but his output was enough to give him a special place in the history of Canadian music. He neatly cloaked a kind of resigned but hopeful mysticism in traditional-sounding songs that used local Canadian history as jumping-off points for expanding and poetic song cycles. This set collects some of his best-known cuts, including “Fogarty’s Cove,” “Northwest Passage,” and “Forty-Five Years,” and it makes a nice introduction to this intriguing folk musician, although listeners may want to go back to hear the songs in their original settings as part of a longer suite, a form Rogers made his own.