Gordon Lightfoot takes a turn for the quiet in "Dream Street Rose," a subtle album that at first seems oddly impersonal coming from Lightfoot, a private man who, as private men sometimes do, tends to make his work intensely personal. And at first it seems regressive; the songs sound (superficially) like some he was writing ten years ago…. A casual first impression might be that it is some kind of retreat from the experimentation of ["Endless Wire"].

That impression would be wrong…. In fact, it represents a refinement of the lyrical aspect of his lyrics. The words of Sea of Tranquility, which at first seem so ignorably casual, gradually ingratiate themselves because they have an easy rhythm reminiscent of one of our better poets…. Sea is a fantasy, if, on the surface, a still-obtainable one—a place of otters and frogs and spotted groundhogs—but the song's language...