WHERE DO SONGS come from Where do songs come ...

Occasionally you find a startling mix of the two. The best work of Canadian songwriter Stan Rogers seems to have been pulled from the sky, as though it had been waiting for him to find it. He deals with the trials and joys of daily life on the Canadian land and (especially) sea, the quiet happiness of married life, the agonies of separation. It's heartfelt, full of flesh and bone, grit and vivid imagery. Sung in Rogers' rolling baritone it seems immortal.

So did Rogers himself, at six-feet-four, delivering his material with perfect self-assurance even with the bald head, rounded face and contained beard of an outsized leprechaun. So his death by suffocation in a freak airliner fire in 1983 felt almost impossible, like the Old Man of the Mountain falling into the abyss in New England.

Rogers delivered a handful of albums over less than a decade, including two live?to my mind by far the best. He drew his audience in not only by affinity but almost by main force; they had no choice. And his band, especially brother Garnet Rogers on fiddle, served as devoted acolytes.

There's a great deal of sentiment in his songs, that's sometimes, I admit, a little over the top. But the ones that really make me weep do so because they're so dead-on true, putting common human emotion into a billowing context supported by telling language.

My one studio album, Northwest Passage, concentrates on Canada's western provinces?farming, cattle ranching/rustling, aging housewives, the bemused nostalgia of out-of-work whalers watching their former "oil of the sea" sport unmolested ("Free in the Harbour"). But the best of those songs?except for the rollicking "Canol Road"?can also be had on the far livelier (and live) Home in Halifax, along with delightfully nasty spoken jibes at Shriners and Morris dancers.

Between the Breaks, recorded live in Toronto, was the first album I picked up and is still my favorite. The ache of loneliness in "First Christmas" grabs my gut every time. And "Barrett's Privateers" is the best pirate song ever. No romance here, just the brutal reality of being snookered into service on a rotting hulk destined for disaster. Yet it's a vibrant, engaging song for all that, with images that drive like spikes ("Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs/And the Maintruck carried off both me legs").

"Harris and the Mare" deals with a conflict you don't see much in songwriting?a pacifist man driven to killing when a mean drunk attacks his wife ("I was a 'Conshie' in the war, crying 'What the hell's this for?'/But I had to see his blood to be a man").

I've saved the best for last. If I were to die tomorrow and had done nothing in my life except write "The Mary Ellen Carter," I would consider myself a success. The tale of a crew who vow to raise their sunken trawler after the owners have written it off, it's the supreme statement of human affirmation.

When Jim Knipfel was searching for a column name back in Philadelphia, before he chose "Slackjaw," he considered "Smiling Bastards Lie," taken from the "Carter": "And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow/With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go?" And the visual poetry is mesmerizing: "?we patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down/Put cables to her 'fore and aft and girded her around?" A flawless song, backed by magical audience rapport.

What's Out There: Everything still seems available. Try either of the two live albums, Home in Halifax or, especially, Between the Breaks.