You can reach Tod at Tod@steelrail.ca.

Lead singer and rhythm guitar player Tod Gorr grew up in the Ottawa Valley, absorbing the style of country singers like George Jones as well as bluegrass legends like Bill Harrell. One critic said his fluid baritone and distinctive phrasing “are as country as the livestock prices and complaints about the weather.”

That's not the only comment that Tod's singing has evoked from music critics. "Lead singer Tod Gorr has a voice that can make angels in Hillbilly Heaven weep," one enthusiastic record reviewer wrote.  

Tod went to school in Kingston, Ont., but spent summers around the hamlet of Plevna, near Sharbot Lake, Ont. His childhood there left him with a lifelong connection to the land; many of his original songs are imbued with a love of the countryside and a respect for nature. Ellen often jokes that Tod's song Old Forgotten Road is the only song ever written that contains the place name Plevna, but that ode to a childhood walk with his grandfather is not the only reference to the area in Tod's original material. His song There Was a Time on the album A Thousand Miles of Snow is based on what he felt as he saw the city of Kingston sprawl out into the natural habitat around it. As for Tod's lyrics for Late Autumn Days, on The Road Less Travelled, they evoke fall in the Canadian Shield: dying leaves, icy black water and a loon calling across the lake.

Tod's recorded originals are Milkweed Pods, Angel Eyes and There Was a Time on A Thousand Miles of Snow; and Old Forgotten Road, Years Still Pass and Late Autumn Days (a co-write with Ellen Shizgal) on The Road Less Travelled.

Two new Tod Gorr songs have also become part of the Steel Rail performing repertoire: the ballad My Valley and Belmont Days, about the now defunct Belmont amusement park in Montreal, which he co-wrote with Lucinda Chodan.   

Tod and his family now live in Prévost in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, although he owns land near Plevna and spends as much as time possible there.