Readers recommend: songs from or about Canada

Neil Young? Joni Mitchell? This week pick out music that goes beyond the big stars to capture the spirit, culture, and landscape of this vast, bilingual country

O Canada! Land of the beaver, the goose, bear and moose, the maple, caribou, mountie and loon. Such a landscape of vast space - the second biggest of any nation in the world, behind Russia, but larger than China and the US, and with the world's biggest volume of fresh water in a whopping, lapping 31,700 lakes. As Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Anka (who, incidentally wrote for Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and Michael Jackson) put it, it's a country "that has a gentler, slower pace - it lends perspective". This, and all those lakes, is something to musically reflect on in time for this coming Canada Day on 1 July.

I visited the land of the maple leaf when I was 12 to see an auntie, uncle and cousins. I was gobsmacked at the scale of things - we took a very slow train from Edmonton in Alberta, going west, and visited Banff National Park, spotted a moose, crossed part of the Athabaska glacier on a snowcat then drank, trickling from its gentle melt, some of the purest water in the world. For two days the train, with a curved glass viewing dome, trundled across vast plains, ending up in Vancouver, where, in Stanley Park, I was amazed to spot and throw nuts to squirrels the size of cats, and all of them entirely black.