 |
After "Sundown" Gordon Lightfoot makes up for lost time, by
Nancy Naglin
"It amazes me that I wrote that volume of material, because I actually felt like I was drying up eight years ago. Every time I made an album I said, 'Oh, this is going to be that last one,' and now I'm on number eleven. I've recorded over 110 songs."
He usually tries out his new songs and audiences before he records them. "I enjoy writing good songs. I like to sing and I don't like to go out on stage with the idea that I don't have anything new to show them." If he's in an area where he hasn't played for a while, he tries to do at least six or seven new tunes. "If I didn't care
about my audience, I would hang up my guitar tomorrow and find some other work."
He's rarely ill at ease - except in, of all places, Toronto. Riverboat owner and long-time friend Burnie Fiedler has been producing an annual set of Lightfoot
concerts at Massey Hall for the last six years. Lightfoot sells out the 2800 - seat theatre eight times, which is the equivalent of doing Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens a time and half. The local boy who has played Carngie Hall and Lincoln Center must be absolutely on top of it in his home town. "They can tell," he says about an ingrown circle of family and fans. In fact, the circle us so complete Lightfoot saved Fiedler from eighteen months of jail by assuming of his embarassing back tax problem.
"I have a pretty good track record. I like to come up with my records in a reasonable length of time. One a year is good. When they sign you up they want to be sure that the act's going to produce material. I have an excellent relationship with my record company [Warner Bros.] Things run smoothly because it is a company of gentlemen. They don't put any pressure on me at all. If I was going through hard times, or had dried up totally and couldn't do anything, they're not going to do anything. Right now my position is quite solid." With his simultaneous number one album and single for Sundown in 1974, that's something of an understatement.
Like a gentleman he won't talk about sex or politics, so that leaves only music. "My idea of an album is something you can talk over if you want to. My albums are not the kind where you're suppose to sit down and pin your ears to it and not think about anything else. What I strive for is variety of thought and consistency of sound. There was some kind of rumor that when I write songs I can do it for about four days or something. Once I wrote an album in four days. It was way back yonder. I like to sit down at the desk with a blank sheet of paper and get a cup pf coffee, a package of cigarettes and sit there and enjoy it. You get depressed, you know. You sit there all day and all afternoon and all night, and when the sun comes up the next day you find everything you wrote was invalid."
His biggest surprise was "Early Morning Rain."
"We didn't have that song done for stage when it became a hit. All of a sudden the thing became a hit and we learned it. After about a month or so of singing it on stage
it really started to sound good.
"Sundown came out on schedule. It was maybe a month late. We put that album together over a three-month period, and I was very happy to sit down and listen to
it. It didn't give me any bad moments. Musically, it was string. The songs were good, and all of a sudden we got a hit single off of it and then 'Carefree Highway.' "
His songs are related indirectly to his experiences, which is why he doesn't like to talk about then. "Sundown," for example, is a tastefully raunchy tune that a lot of people wanted to believe was about his wife. "All it is, is a thought about a situation where someone is wondering what his live one is doing at the moment. He doesn't quite know where she is. He's not ready to give up on her, either, and that's about all I got to say about that."
|
|
