And so this is it, folks, the temporary end of the road for the career-spanning Gordon Lightfoot box set I put together, now complete with Volume Three. And inevitably, as with most career retrospectives, we now run into what is known as the Last Disc Problem, something a music fan who has listened to a boxset or five will be familiar with. If a retrospective follows an artist to the end, a gradual decline sets in, some time after the halfway point and, in a multiple disc box set, noticably on the last disc. Thus, the Last Disc Problem, as the high quality of the preceding discs simply isn't there. This is also true for our last run through Gordon Lightfoot's discography, unfortunately. A Life In Song Vol. 3 - River Of Light isn't as constantly great as the first two discs, which would have been a pretty high bar to clear either way. (I know, I'm doing quite the sales job for today's One Buck Record of the day, huh?!). But there is something to be said for sticking it out to the end - both for the artist, and its audience. And I can't think of many others who stuck it out until the end like Gordon Lightfoot did. And there is still plenty of great music here
When we first hear Lightfoot at the beginning of River Of Light, during rousing opener "I'd Do It Again", his voice is still strong. Summertime Dream is in many ways Gordon's last hurrah, both in commercial terms and as a songwriter of consistently high quality output.Everything else afterwards has to be qualified in some way. This would sadly be proven true by 1978's Endless Wire, the first disappointment after a long string of good to very good albums. "Handdog Hotel Room", like "I'd Do It Again" an ode to Lightfoot's relentless touring, and "Sweet Guinevere" are the top picks from an underwhelming album, mired in surprisingly awful production by Lenny Waronker, and with the most atrocious cover art of any Lightfoot album to add insult to injury. "Endless Wire should have been called 'Endless touring makes you tired'", said James Chrispell stingingly but correctly in his review for Allmusic to explain the bored, and boring-sounding material here and concluded, also correctly, "the downward slide had begun".
1980's Dream Street Rose was a much better effort by both Waronker and Lightfoot. The former (with some help from fellow VIP WB producer Russ Titleman) went back to a much more synpathetic production reminiscent of his mid-70s work, while Lightfoot simply wrote a better batch of songs, including "Ghosts Of Cape Horn", "On The High Seas" and the title track. But that album was indeed the end of the road for that producer-artist tandem that ran for a decade and eight albums, nine if you count the re-recorded first half of Gord's Gold. This is truly the last old-school sounding record of Lightfoot's career.
1982's Shadows was produced by Lightfoot and Ken Friesen, and it was the start of Lightfoot's MOR/Adult Contemporary period, where acoustic instruments and orchestrations are now replaced by synthesizers everywhere. but it is a surprisingly strong record, something Lightfoot himself considered so. He was disappointed by the album's commercial failure, calling the album "the music industry's best-kept secret". Upon relistening for this project, I was surprised how many tunes I liked from an album I had written off as adult contemporary pap. Conseuqently, Shadows gets a whooping four selections - the most of any album post-Summertime Dream - on River Of Light, including the rousing seafaring tale "Triangle (formerly featured on Shanties), the stock-taking "In My Fashion" and the moody "Heaven Help The Devil".
Salute one year later, howver, saw Lightfoot sucumb to the trends of the days, as it is his most 80's sounding album, and I don't mean that in a good way. A plastic drum sound, electric guitars and keyboard swashes everywhere, together with a sometimes forced-sounding optimism make for akward listening, the romantic acoustic troubadour of old now sounding like he'd want to compete with Kenny Rogers and the like. Thus, the two most old-fashioned and folky numbers, "Whispers Of The North" and "Tattoo" have been selected for inclusion from what is ultimately a misbegotten attempt to update his sound.
The nadir of Lightfoot's glossy AOR/adult contemporary period is 1986's East Of Midnight, which has such a slick, synthetic production that even the few memorable songs inevitably suffer from it. Album highlight "A Passing Ship" survives intact, but for the other highlight "I'll Tag Along" - which Lightfoot began to perform as a solo acoustic song after the breaks in his shows - shows up here as a solo song, though played on eletric guitar, for a TV Special in 1991. It's much better than the glossy, overproduced version from East Of Midnight.
Sandwiched in betwen these two songs is a possibly surprising selection. Fascinatingly, the exact things that essentially killed the utterly useless modern re-recordings on Gord's Gold Vol. 2 are responsable for the one song that is a success: "The Pony Man", originally from Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind, and thus easily the oldest song on the set, is like the rest filled with keyboards that replace the original acoustic framework. But here it actually works!The synth backing is atmospheric, rather than distracting, maybe because the song itself is essentially a children's dream tale, with the slightly otherwordly keyboard backing conjuring a fitttingly dream-like atmosphere and thus adding to the song, rather than subtracting, as on every other remake from the disc.
1993's Waiting For You, Lightfoot's comeback after he had declared giving up writing and recording (though not touring) after East Of Midnight's commercial failure, was hailed as a return to form and to a more fitting acoustic sound, even though for my personal taste a lot of it is still way too glossy. The title track and "Only Love Would Know" are the top picks from the album.
The mid-90's is unfortunately also the time when Lightfoot's voice really started to get compromised. The muddled, fussy, keyboard-heavy arrangements Lightfoot leaned on were maybe also a way to try and compensate for Lightfoot's weakening singing voice, which lost range, power and stamina. Lightfoot started to be unable to hit prolonged notes, with his singing becoming clipped and wispy. You can hear that once strong voice decaying at unfortunate speed. It's already getting quite thin on 1999's A Painter Passing Through, notably on the title track and a couple of others, so I chose the two tracks ("Ringneck Loon" and "Uncle Toad Said") that reunited good songwriting with a stronger vocal performance.
2004's Harmony was recorded after a major health scare for Lightfoot, and was constructed by his band around Lightfoot's vocals from his demos, which some critics used to explain the less-than-great vocal performance. But it ultimately probably wouldn't have mattered. Harmony is, other than as a welcome sign of life, a relatively forgettable album. And yet it yielded a single classic, the newly minted title song for this volume of A Life In Song, "River Of Light". If you listen past the clipped enunciation and increasingly nasal delivery that would define his final recordings, the song itself is great, easily his best in years.
Lightfoot touring and recording well into his Eighties despite his voice now reduced to a wispy croak is nothing if not a lesson in persisting. Old Lightfoot becomes a bit the Don Quixote character he sang about, if I may paraphrase. "Singing in a whisper now, he sings in cities from shore to shore / 'till he can sing no more". So, I'm of two minds here: I don't know whether it's brave or foolhardy to go into a studio at over eighty years old, just with a guitar, and with your voice almost gone, and record a solo acoustic album. Probably a bit of both. Truthfully, most songs on Solo aren't great - as songs or performances - and when Lightfoot tries (and mostly fails) to whistle on "Dreamdrift" it's almost painful to listen to. Time and cigarettes and illness may have done a number on Lightfoot's voice, but he does not yield. There is something noble in an old warrior like Lightfoot going out on his shield like that.
The two songs from Solo, "Return To Dust" and "Oh So Sweet" weren't necessarily planned or written as 'last songs', though they surely play that role well. For Solo, Lightfoot had discovered some demos from 2001 and 2002, tried to update and revise some of them (and failed) and finally recorded them as they were. Both are - whether planned or not - songs that illustrate the long goodbye, Lightfoot's and everybody's. Though his voice is now clearly as close to the end of the trail as Lightfoot himself, the lyrics are impressive. "Return To Dust" is a clear-eyed look back, including at his alcoholism: " They said drink and be restored / all I ever drank made me end up on the floor / and what is more a mind turned to rust that's for sure / we will return into dust through the years."
"O So Sweet" adds some more retrospection, as Lightfoot looks back bitter-sweetly on his life: "The road I chose was not all it should be / but sometimes it was oh so sweet", only to end up with some last words of wisdom for the last steps of the road: "Sometimes I remember seeing starlight fade / back when life was still only a mystery / was it good, was it bad, was it the best you ever had? / But sometimes it was oh so sweet".
And so was your music, Gordon, so was your music.
Thank you for the music of a lifetime. Thank you for letting me, and us, tag along. Thank you for everything, Gordon.
Yours Truly,
the One Buck Guy