Tony Dekker
Canadian singer and songwriter

Tony Dekker is a Canadian singer and songwriter. Most noted as leader of the indie folk band Great Lake Swimmers, he has also released two solo albums.
Early life and education
Born and raised in Wainfleet, Ontario, Dekker studied literature at the University of Western Ontario.
Career
Dekker recorded his band's first two albums, Great Lake Swimmers and Bodies and Minds, in Wainfleet, in an abandoned grain silo and a Catholic church, respectively. By the time of the band's third album Ongiara, Dekker and the band were based in Toronto full time. In 2008, Dekker composed the score for Song Sung Blue, a documentary film.
In addition to his work with Great Lake Swimmers, Dekker released his debut solo album Prayer of the Woods in 2013. He followed up in 2014 with Tony Dekker Sings 10 Years of Zunior, an album of covers of other Canadian artists, including Old Man Luedecke, Chad VanGaalen, Christine Fellows, Ohbijou, Rae Spoon, Matt Mays, Martin Tielli, Jennifer Castle and Cadence Weapon.
“Tony Dekker” enters the record as canadian singer and songwriter. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tony, Dekker and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Tony Dekker” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tony, Dekker and Canadian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q50874722. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2013 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tony Dekker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.