RICHMOND Times,Virginia interview-Jul.16-2014
 

http://www.timesdispatch.com/enterta...c3825e841.html
July 17,2014
Gordon Lightfoot still golden after all these years

BY HAYS DAVIS Special correspondent

At a point in the mid-1970s, few artists had quite the same presence on pop radio as Gordon Lightfoot. Following his breakthrough 1970 hit, “If You Could Read My Mind,” the chart-topping “Sundown” three years later began a renewed and even greater peak of popularity, though he was rarely free to absorb it at the time.

“I was excited, but I was always working on my next project all that time, my next album, immediately,” said Lightfoot, speaking from his Toronto home. “I had a contract, had a family, had a band. I worked.

“I went from album to album to album, so I didn’t spend too much time thinking about what I had done before,” he added with a laugh, “but I was certainly thrilled by the fact that we had (those) great hits, and that makes me feel real good.”

Apart from music studies in California in the late ’50s, Lightfoot has always resided in his native Canada, where his career took root.

Beginning as a folk singer, he quickly gained renown as a songwriter when a 1964 cover by Ian & Sylvia of his “Early Morning Rain” was the first of numerous takes on his songs by a wide range of artists over the years. Marty Robbins’ “Ribbon of Darkness” and Elvis Presley’s “Early Morning Rain” are among his favorites.

A stretch of late-’60s albums on United Artists were popular in Canada, but it was his years with Warner Bros./Reprise that launched him internationally as a singer-songwriter.
His first for the label, 1970’s “Sit Down Young Stranger,” shortly became better known for its Top 5 hit single, though not before the artist wrangled with Warners over its marketing.

“They wanted to change the (album) title so they could ship a whole lot more product out,” recalled Lightfoot, “and they didn’t consult with me. When I asked why they were doing it they asked if I took algebra in high school, and I said, ‘Well, yes, I did.’ They said, ‘Well, it’s the difference between x and 7x.’”

With the album retitled “If You Could Read My Mind,” it went gold as the single brought Lightfoot a considerably wider audience. After several more moderately successful LPs, Lightfoot topped the charts in the U.S. and Canada with the single and album “Sundown.”

“I knew it was a good song when I wrote it, and I knew I was going to call the album ‘Sundown’ two months before it came out. I actually felt in my heart that was going to be the song. And when it got picked by Bill Gavin in The Gavin Report in San Francisco, it was important when that stuff happened.”

Over the next two years, the singles “Carefree Highway” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” kept Lightfoot in the Top 10, during a period where Lightfoot felt he had truly settled into what he did best.

“At that point I was doing all my own basic tracks in that album following that, and we had some really good albums after that,” he noted, recording 14 albums in all for Warner Bros.
These days the singer-songwriter stays busy on the road with his band, and as he’s not currently recording, Lightfoot enjoys being able to focus on performing. “We really love doing these concerts.

“And (the hits) all work very well on the stage also, which is really good. They’re good stage songs. Some people can have a hit single and not be able to reproduce it on the stage. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times. But it’s fortunate that all of them are great songs to sing on the stage because they get played each and every night."