Setting sails on the long river of Gordon Lightfoot's career...

The author of one of those (in)famous 1000 Records You Need To Listen To Before You Die/Become Deaf/Become Incontinent was asked why in his book  he didn't include a single album by Gordon Lightfoot. His answer was sad, but almost understandable. He said that while Lightfoot made great music, there wasn't a single album that would define him as a artist. Which is totally true. Lightfoot made many very good albums, no bad and only a few mediocre ones. But he never had that one classic album that would catapult him into these 'Best Of' or 'Must Listen'-lists. It's terribly unfair. Some artists or bands can have a career of uninspired mediocrity and still make appearances on these lists if they managed an album that became a modern classic for one reason or another, while Lightfoot toiling away at his craft for more than sicty years isn't repaid in kindness. Lightfoot was kind of always there, and everyone can attest to the beauty of his music, but he hasn't really left his footprint (pun fully intended, thank you very much) on music history. Which is why, nstead of music journalists, we let one of the best ever to do the singer-songwriter thing be the judge, jury and executioner:

If you can't trust Dylan, who can you trust, AmIrite? 

Anyway, so this new Lightfoot project. What happened while I was preparing Shanties is, what usually happens when I launch myself into a new project: I go on a music binge and listen to eveything I have from the artist in question. When I worked on Warren Zevon in January, I listened to almost his entire oeuvre, same for Queen a month later. So working on that Lightfoot comp made me relisten, slowly but surely, to all twenty studio albums, plus Sunday Concert and the two Gord's Gold comps. That is a lot of Lightfoot to listen to. First observation: Yes, the standards are really high, because there is nary a bad song among these hundreds of songs, though that ratio is getting worse in career decades three, four and five. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. The idea was to make a career retrospective that covers Lightfoot's career from his debut album Lightfoot! in early 1966 all the way to his last album, Solo in 2020. This retrospective will be three CD-length albums chock full of great music,which I will dole out in single installments. If you are anything like me, in between your record collections and the music you download, you probably have way more music than you get to listen to in short order, so this will come slowly and individually to give you time to listen, but thse albums will eventually make up a nice box set of sorts when complete. For the first two write-ups I will run quickly through the albums the songs come from and occasionally why I picked some of them instead of others. 

Today's first installment of A Life In Song is subtitled Long River and covers the period from 1966 to 1971. I didn't put any of Lightfoot' juvenilia, like the horrid MOR country stuff he cut in 1962, on here, because this really is supposed to bring the best of the best, not cover every corner of his long career. So we'll start with four tracks off Lightfoot!, two showing Lightfoot at his purest, with just him and his acoustic guitar on "Long River" and "Sixteen Miles (To Seven Lakes)". Early and often covered classics "Early Morning Rain" and "Steel Rail Blues" complete the line-up before  giving way to the "Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle" which I have discussed in great length on Shanties. Let me just add here that, on second thought, it being left off his studio albums of the time was probably more a question of bad timing rather than some sort of conspiracy. He debuted the title in January 1966, right after the release of his debut album, but then it was another 15 months before the follow-up, so by that time the topical "ballad" was a bit passé. Next is a song that is a bit of departure for Lightfoot, the very jngle jangle-y "Spin Spin" that dutifully became a hit in Canada and nowhere else and for some reason will not get a decent release from United Artists. This is a version of the song that he recut in Nashville, possibly for a U.S. release that never happened, but it's more driving and, uh, jingle jangle-y, so it gets the nod over the original single version. 

The Way I Feel was a decent follow-up to Lightfoot's debut, here presented by "If You Got It", where Lightfoot sounds so youthful and happy, that I simply had to include it, and "Go-Go Round", which has one of the album's most memorable melodies. And then there's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy", a total classic, and probably in the top ten of Lightfoot songs. Epic storytelling, in every sense of the word. The following year's Did She Mention My Name? has the great title song (with two lines that always make me smile - "Is the landlord still a loser? Do his signs still hang in the hall?"), the vaguely protest song adjacent "Boss Man" with some interesting backing vocals and the two magnificent ballads "Wherefore And Why" and "The Mountains And Maryann", that with their orchestrations would point to Lightfoot's future. Follow-up Back Here On Earth from later in the year has classic ballads "Bitter Green" and "The Circle Is Small" (a decade later pointlessly remade by Lightfoot) and, as a more personal favorite, "Long Way Back Home", one of Lightfoot's numerous wanderlust numbers. 

Sunday Concert was a contractual obligation album, the mandatory live album to get out of his contract with United Artists, but at least Lightfoot loaded it with a number of unreleased songs, including "Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle" and "Apology, the latter of which is feautured here. He signed with Reprise, hoping that they could break him through in the U.S. His debut for Reprise, starting his collaboration with producer Lenny Waronker, was indeed the commercial breakthrough Lightfoot had hoped for, though it took a bit of time. Originally entitled Sit Down Young Stranger, it really took off when "If You Could Read My Mind" stormed the charts in early 1971, more than eight months after the album was released. It was thus dutifully retitled If You Could Read My Mind. If you had to pick an album that comes as close as possible to representing him, it probably would be this one for the early folkie years. Sure, there's more orchestration than on most UA albums, but this is sort of the ideal album of Lightfoot the romantic bard. It was also the first Lightfoot album I ever bought and I love it dearly, resulting in it being represented by a whooping five songs. Even then I had to leave a song like "Cobwebs & Dust" on the outs. Tough choices, everywhere. 

This collection ends with three tracks from 1971's Summer Side Of Life. The title song is so jaunty and well, sunny, that you can easily overhear the lyrics about the young man, seemingly a Vietnam war vet, crying all day long. Like in the equally featured "Sit Down Young Stranger", Lightfoot acknowledges that war ithout taking specific political sides, other than a general 'war isn't great'-attitude. As I stated in my first write-up for Shanties, he felt uncomfortable as a decideldly political writer or protest singer, so contemporary concerns mostly bubble up as subtext. Also featured are the lovely "10 Degrees & Getting Colder", another song about being on the roaad, and his ode to Canadian unity, "Nous Vivons Ensemble", featured here in slightly edited form. 

And that's it, that's Gordon Lightfoot's Life in Song, Vol. 1, with two more volumes coming up in the next weeks to complete this career-spanning box set courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood blogger OBG. So, get on that long river and let yourself be carried by some wonderful melodies and performances of Mr. Gordon Meredith Lightfoot.