Gordon Lightfoot’s 10 Essential Songs
Bob Dylan once named Gordon Lightfoot one of his favorite songwriters, and called the musician “somebody of rare talent” while inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986. On Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” he even recorded Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” and the respect was mutual — Lightfoot listened carefully to Dylan’s songs, which instilled in him “a more direct approach, getting away from the love songs,” he once said.
In an expansive career that drew from Greenwich Village folk and Laurel Canyon pop, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr., who died on Monday at 84, was embraced by a diverse group of musicians: Elvis Presley and Duran Duran, Lou Rawls and the Replacements. He sang in a rueful baritone full of tenacity and an almost professorial air, and specialized in songs that dwelled on solitude, or recounted unhappy relationships, in grounded language that drew on folk and blues modes.
“Lightfoot’s is the voice of the romantic,” Geoffrey Stokes of The Village Voice wrote in 1974. “For him (as for Don Quixote, one of his chosen heroes) perfection is always in view and always slipping from his grasp.”
Nowhere was Lightfoot more beloved than in his native Canada, where he helped transform its music industry into a worldwide force. “He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here,” Geddy Lee of Rush said in “If You Could Read My Mind,” a 2019 documentary. “We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry.” In the process, Lightfoot became one of the most successful recording artists of the 1970s.
Source: The New York Times
