Capturing light is not easy: ask any outdoor photographer. In order to capture the perfect shot, one has to be ready for fragmentary shifts in illumination. In that spirit, Caught Light is Great Lake Swimmers’ ninth album, and perhaps their most nimble: be prepared, don’t overthink, act fast.
Founder Tony Dekker has always been akin to a wildlife photographer, often choosing to make records in unique surroundings with a connection to Ontario history. This time, he holed up in the Ganaraska Forest, between Peterborough and Port Hope, with producer Darcy Yates (Bahamas) and engineer Jimmy Bowskill (Blue Rodeo). Their goal was to tap the warmth of early ’70s folk/pop/rock, whether it be the cozy sonic sweater of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic work, or the gentleness of underrated American songwriter Dory Previn. Dekker made everyone listen to John Martyn’s 1971 album Bless the Weather before the session.
For the first time, Dekker ceded control to a producer, albeit one who had once been the bassist in Great Lake Swimmers (2007-08). Yates chose the studio and the backing band, which included veteran drummer Gary Craig (Bruce Cockburn, Jann Arden), who Dekker calls “the Jim Keltner of Canada.” Tracking was completed in three days, Nashville-style, with only two days of overdubs, including Colleen Brown’s backing vocals. Compare that with 2023’s Uncertain Country, which took three pandemic-stricken years to make.
Caught Light was captured in the shortest amount of time Dekker had ever spent making a record, and it’s likely to be the one with perhaps the longest impact. That’s because Caught Light is not just the most fully realized Great Lake Swimmers album in years, but it also leads off with two of Dekker’s strongest singles.
“One More Dance Around the Sun” is an open-window, summer-driving song to accompany a golden-hour trip through the backroads of your childhood hometown. Dekker himself moved back to the Niagara area during the pandemic, with his partner and two young children. “I spent the first half of my life trying to get out of the small town where I was born and raised, and I’m spending the second half getting back there,” says the songwriter who lived in Toronto his entire adult life until now. “It’s an ode to the familiarity and the joy in that and the repetition of seeing the same faces and places, knowing all of that very well. It’s also important to feel grounded in community, to feel the power of that in a specific place, keeping one’s moral compass fixed in the right direction.”
“Wrong, Wrong, Wrong” is about seeking solace in a trusted friend, one who can listen to your worldsickness without judgment, the one person in the world who understands your anxiety and won’t get it wrong. Dekker’s voice, though voicing the character who needs reassurance, is itself therapeutic, an empathetic ear who mirrors the narrator’s concerns. For a song about fragile mental health, it’s not ready to wallow: it’s a jaunty country shuffle, likely the most uplifting minor-key pop song of 2025, with a stardust-laden pedal-steel solo by Bowskill.
Bowskill is the secret weapon on Caught Light, a wizard with any stringed instrument, while simultaneously engineering the record. “He’d hit the recording button,” recalls Dekker, “and then play pedal steel or mandolin or fiddle or bouzouki and would be playing electric guitar and other acoustic instruments—while also placing mics. I’d never seen anyone work at that high level before. It informed a lot of the character of the record, him and Darcy. It’s as much theirs as it is mine, though I brought in fully formed songs.”
The new players really come to life on “Running Out of Time,” one of the only explicitly political songs in the Great Lake Swimmers’ catalogue, which adds psychedelic overtones to a song about how “It’s time, not for profit / not for greed / without borders / out of love.”
The title track, and also “Endless Detours,” are about embracing twists of fate, inspired by a childhood image. “Where I grew up in a rural part of Niagara Region, on a farm, in the back 40, there was a very small airstrip with a skydiving club,” Dekker explains. “As kids, we’d see these guys jumping out of planes, five, six at a time. Once, one of them landed in the fields around our house. That was such a powerful image to me as a kid: What happens when you don’t land where you intended, when life blows you off course?” The phrase “caught light” refers to an unexpected situation where you don’t have as much as you thought you wanted or needed. Early on in the album process, it became apparent that it would be the title track.
It’s also a metaphor for Great Lake Swimmers’ career in 2025: more than 20 years in, they’re a Canadian institution, with a large family of past collaborators who drift in and out of the band. “We were in a really great place leading up to the pandemic, then we lost a lot of steam, like a lot of people,” says Dekker, who took stock by unearthing a 2007 live show, releasing an acoustic retrospective, and a book collecting his lyrics. “Now, it feels like we are starting from scratch again.”
Dekker says he has “a newly found zeal for not being precious and being more direct.” With Caught Light being one of his best albums, he’s done exactly that. Great Lake Swimmers are ready to swim to new shores. Or maybe just explore the infinite details of their native coastlines.
