Sylvia Tyson is known, at least to those conversant in the 1960s folk revival, as half of the popular duo Ian & Sylvia. Unlike a good part of the music from that era, their recordings, at least the major ones issued on the Vanguard label, have aged remarkably well. I am hardly alone in still listening to them from time to time. Another group's cover of her "You Were on My Mind" was a significant hit in those days.

After the couple's divorce in the mid-1970s, Ian Tyson went on to a generally uninspired solo career as a country performer in his native Canada. When he found his artistic center a few years later, it was as a Western balladeer, singing reality-based traditional and trad-based songs of ranch life and labor (in which, by the way, gunplay and violence play little role). He bought a ranch in Alberta and made it his day job. As a star of the emerging Rocky Mountains-centered cowboy-culture movement, he released folk-based recordings until a few years before his death in 2022. (For a sample, see my review of what would be his last, Carneo Vaquero, posted here on 30 May 2015.) He was widely admired, and I was a big fan. I wrote about several of his albums here. Fellow Albertan Corb Lund pays tribute, fond but unsentimental, in the title song to his 2024 album El Viejo.

On the other hand, I sort of lost track of Sylvia Tyson after Ian & Sylvia broke up. I knew she had also taken up a career in Canada, moving to Toronto to write city-based, often more or less autobiographical songs. Ian's second career brought him a measure of fame outside the national border. Sylvia's didn't, and she seemed content with that. I further concede that I am not much taken with singer-songwriters, in particular those who are using themselves and their friends for their material. I might add in this context that as ubiquitous as they are, singer-songwriters don't have their own unique genre designation, though one often sees "folk singer" alleged. Among other things folk music, which is by definition communal, is pretty much the opposite of what this is -- if you want to be unkind, self-absorbed. In any event, more than acoustic guitar is necessary to connect with folk, if that's what you want. Not that you'd have to tell that to Tyson.

Which is, I guess, to explain why this is the first solo album of Sylvia Tyson I've heard. It showed up as a review copy in my mail a while ago. I didn't listen to it then because it did not occur to me that I would have any particular interest in it, by which I meant no disrespect, just unattached tastes. Finally, however, I decided to give it a spin, and then I gave it another. And another. Yet one more spin turns merrily as I type.

As I should have known, Sylvia Tyson knows what she's doing. At the End of the Day, as the title intimates, is a late-in-life retrospective on life, love and memory, set to solid melodies based specifically or broadly in country, blues, pop and -- yes -- folk, though all sound, um, Sylvia-esque. One song adapts an old English melody.

There are no bad cuts. The stories and reflections are performed with a small acoustic band whose instruments encompass fiddle, mandolin, accordion, guitars, keyboards and drums. I was taken aback by how much pleasure I was taking from what I was hearing.

Then again, it hit me, this is Sylvia Tyson, who was pretty damn good when I was paying attention to her in a somewhat different incarnation all those years ago. Except for irritable, misguided prejudice on my end, there is no reason I can think of that I wouldn't have liked what she was doing in the interim. And the woman can still sing, and movingly. What, I wondered, had I been missing? Worse, what was I thinking? At the End of the Day is what you listen to music for.