“If you could read my mind, love. What a tale my thoughts could tell.” Not my words, of course, but those of the late Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer who, perhaps incredibly, became a musical hero to me while I was in my early teens. On the surface, I was a common or garden young teenager, revelling in the excitement of Mac Bolan and T. Rex among others, the music of my generation. Lightfoot, already in his mid thirties, made music that I adored and I still love it today.
I am not sure whether the first Lightfoot song I ever heard was what became his greatest hit, If You Could Read My Mind, which was, not that I knew at the time, a powerful song about a troubled relationship, believed to be all about his first marriage. It may have been Early Morning Rain, a raw and vivid song of homesickness and displacement or maybe Steel Rail Blues, a similar story.
As the 1970s exploded with bright young things making exciting music, I had Gordon. In 1972, he released Don Quixote and there were numerous seafaring songs including my all-time favourite Christian Island. Trains, planes, boats, Lightfoot wrote about them all, often heartachingly and heartbreakingly, especially the astonishing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
His creative peak was unquestionably the 1970s, although he did return to form in 1986 with East Of Midnight and again in with 1998’s A Painter Passing Through.
I never saw him live in concert although I really should have. He played the Bristol Colston Hall in 2016, playing a remarkable 27 songs over two sets. I knew that his voice had declined and he was not in the best of health and foolishly I concluded that I wouldn’t enjoy it, that it might tarnish my memory of him. That decision after having seen Brian Wilson perform many times, a man whose health was far worse than Lightfoot’s.
Gordon Lightfoot’s music resonated with me purely on account of the fact it was just so good. That my father had long emigrated to Canada had no bearing on it. I found Lightfoot on my own. But when I was in Canada last month, I visited a bookshop and bought a copy of Nicholas Jennings’ book Lightfoot, believed to be the definitive biography. I think it is, too. I’m loving it.
And more than ever, I enjoy the words he created, incredible stories and descriptions, painting pictures with words; the painter passing through.
I was sad when he died in 2023 because he was there when I was a boy evolving into a man. His music went deep into my soul and stayed there. It will always be there.
