Northwood

Northwood – Let It Be Me is a 1992 Canadian album connected to the CBC teen drama Northwood, released on Attic Records and produced by Claire Lawrence, with Nick Orchard credited as executive producer. The series, created by Orchard, aired on CBC from 1991 to 1994 and followed a group of teenagers in the fictional North Vancouver suburb of Northwood. Rather than functioning as a conventional soundtrack album of score music, Let It Be Me presents a set of polished pop and adult-contemporary recordings associated with the show and its young cast.

The album’s title track, “Let It Be Me,” became the recording most closely remembered by viewers, helped by its use within the series and its connection to the show’s teen-romance storylines. The track list combines familiar material such as “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “Rainbow Connection,” “Feel a Whole Lot Better,” “Friday on My Mind,” and “The Water Is Wide” with lesser-known contemporary pop material. The result is a distinctly early-1990s Canadian television tie-in: modest in scale, cleanly produced, and aimed more at fans of the program than at the broader pop market.

Claire Lawrence’s involvement gives the album a deeper Canadian music connection. By the time of this release, Lawrence had already built a long career through The Collectors, Chilliwack, Valdy, The Hometown Band, and later film and television work. His production gives Let It Be Me a professional studio sheen even when the performances retain the earnest, youth-oriented quality of the television series. A later listener review described the album as featuring “3 stars from the popular Canadian college drama,” noting that the CD was “pretty good” despite “average vocal ability” and uneven choices of covers and originals. That mixed reaction captures the album’s unusual place: not a major pop statement, but a small, memorable artifact of Canadian youth television culture.

For many viewers, Northwood occupied a space somewhere between Canadian teen drama, school-life realism, and early-1990s CBC programming. The album has survived largely through that nostalgia. Online comments attached to surviving clips show viewers remembering the show, praising the “Let It Be Me” arrangement, and expressing surprise at finding the version again years later. In that sense, Let It Be Me remains less important as a standalone pop album than as a document of a brief moment when Canadian television, young performers, Attic Records, and veteran West Coast music production intersected.