https://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...s-himself.html
Gordon Lightfoot’s harshest critic is himself
Legendary Canadian musician, who plays Massey Hall Nov. 23 to 26, is still just aiming to please.
By JOEL RUBINOFFTorstar News Service
Mon., Nov. 21, 2016
He’s a Canadian icon who still relates to the part of himself that once worked as a truck driver, an office worker, an onion-skin-paper music transcriber, back when he was young, unknown and had nothing.
A masterful songwriter more likely to defer to his backing band than take credit for himself.
A perfectionist who remembers with jarring precision the edits made on a radio hit from 40 years ago.
A guy who lives in the moment, but never forgets.
He’s Gordon Lightfoot.
And at an age when most artists are settling in for the Slow Fade, he’s out on the road, playing for the crowds who have seen him through good times and bad, aware of his mortality, savouring every minute.
“We love to work while the sun shines,” notes the Orillia native in his genial, good-humoured way. “Because the night will come when you may no longer work — that was from Dylan,” says Lightfoot, who begins a four-night stand at Massey Hall on Wednesday.
When he picked up the phone for a late night interview recently, I figured we’d have 10 minutes to speak, 15 tops.
That’s how it is with most celebrities: wham, bam and don’t forget to plug my latest project, whatever your name is.
Lightfoot — low-key, sincere, Canadian in the ways that matter most — gives the impression of having all the time in the world.
For the generation of Canadians who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, he’s the musical equivalent of maple syrup and Mounties, a guy who not only represented Canada at a pivotal moment in its cultural history but actually became its voice.
“I have just a really strong love for people when I perform, I really do,” notes the modest songwriter, deflecting suggestions he is in any way larger than life
“It’s almost like you’re playing to everybody individually. You’ve probably heard that said before, but that’s what it feels like to me.”
Lightfoot comes off in interviews as a happy guy, considerate of others, content with his lot.
But dig a little deeper and he’ll peel back the blinders — only so far, mind you — on the hardships and frustrations that have fuelled his best work, the sobering introspection that seems not only part of the man himself but the struggling ambitions of the country that spawned him.
“I was going to school in Los Angeles and I was homesick,” he says of his iconic ode to loneliness, “Early Morning Rain.” “I was one of those kinda guys. I missed my parents.”
The song, the tale of a wistful loner watching planes take off “with an aching in my heart/ And my pockets full of sand,” captures the mood of bittersweet reflection for which Lightfoot would become famous.
“I found something romantic whenever a new type of airplane came out,” he confides softly. “And all of the sudden here was this beautiful brand new Boeing 707 taking off into the sky and just disappearing right into the cloud cover.”
The truth is, most of his hits have a tinge of sadness.
“Sundown,” his ’74 smash and sole U.S. No. 1, is a song about infidelity.
“If You Could Read My Mind,” which hit No. 5 in ’71, was inspired by his divorce.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” his acknowledged masterwork from ’76, is about a capsized freighter with 29 dead crewmen.
And don’t get him started on “For Lovin’ Me,” covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Peter, Paul and Mary, in which he callously informs his lover, “I got a hundred more like you.”
“I sang that for 25 years,” he says, explaining why he excised it from his set list.
“And every time I sang it I felt badly because it was a song I wrote while I was in a marriage I knew wasn’t going to work out and it must have been terribly offensive to my wife.
“After a while it bothered me so much when I would sing it, I would find myself thinking about what a terrible person I was at the time.”
He is, to be sure, his own toughest critic, conflicted in the way all great artists are conflicted, as I discover when I ask about the 50th anniversary of his debut album, Lightfoot!
“First of all, I was working solo,” he recalls. “We did it all right there one take: no overdubbing or any of that stuff.
“So it’s a very raw kind of a romantic thing that even I didn’t find particularly exciting. Even within myself, it bothered me. I tried to keep working my way into a more uplifting mode as it went along.”
Wait, what?
To be clear, the folk-influenced Lightfoot! — which includes oft-covered songs like “For Lovin’ Me,” “Steel Rail Blues,” “Early Morning Rain” and “Ribbon of Darkness” — launched his career as a songwriter, predated the singer-songwriter movement by half a decade and is an album every Canadian musician with an acoustic guitar has turned to as a source of inspiration.
A stone cold classic.
Lightfoot, who can’t separate the work from the context in which it was recorded, doesn’t see it.
“It kinda depresses me in a way when I hear it,” he says. “But still, it’s got some quality in there like ‘Oh, Linda.’ Several songs in there resonate very well even today.”
It’s not the only time in our freewheeling conversation he’ll defy expectations.
As it turns out, most of the classic tunes we take for granted as part of our cultural heritage are rooted in the reality of a guy who, at the time he wrote them, was struggling with the issues of day-to-day life: raising kids, relationships, angling for a break.
That’s what Lightfoot remembers when he looks back.
“You know, I shouldn’t use that word,” he offers when I suggest that “depressing” may not be the best way to describe his musical breakthrough.
“I shouldn’t deflate myself. I kinda remember where my head was at when I was doing that stuff I was going through.
“I was married, two young children, fighting to keep it together. It wasn’t working, the marriage declined.
“It reminds me of a time I sometimes would rather forget.”
Maybe because our phone conversation takes place in the evening, the aging minstrel seems less the reclusive genius and more an affable storyteller, eager to share minute details of a career that has had its share of peaks and valleys.
“We did some great stuff,” he says, recalling his recording stint with L.A.-based Warner Brothers.
“They had Michael McDonald, Paul Simon, Arlo Guthrie, Randy Newman. We competed against one another.
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