The Man Who Married Music: The Best of Stephen Fearing

Juno Award-winning, Canadian singer-songwriter Stephen Fearing assembled this collection from two decades of work: six studio albums, a live album and two additional new tracks (“The Big East West,” “No Dress Rehearsal”). His voice and Celtic folk influences are reminiscent of Richard Thompson with whom he’s worked. “The Finest Kind,” in fact, is a dead-ringer for a latter-day Thompson tune. “Home” recalls Neil Young’s “Down By the River” with its lurching rhythm. Elsewhere, Fearing maps out his own idiosyncratic voice backed by his dexterous acoustic guitar playing. It gives these songs of wanderlust and yearning an extra bounce and brings Fearing’s consistent melancholy a bittersweet beauty that haunts tunes such as “Beguiling Eyes,” “The Longest Road,” and “The Bells of Morning.” Fearing has never cut a poor album and, if anything, this collection is simply too brief a synopsis for a career so rewarding and complex. Let it serve as an introduction to a much underrated and often overlooked major talent.