saw clips of the press conference at Massey today...LOTS of press!
haven't seen the CBC thing yet....tonight at 9 - CBC Newsworld- you can possibly see it on-line -
www.cbc.ca - OR
http://www.cbc.ca/national/#features
ROGERS TV HAD THIS on-line:
http://www.hispeed.rogers.com/news/e...p?cid=e051056A
Gordon Lightfoot presides over Monday launch party for his new CD Harmony
at 17:33 on May 10, 2004, EST.
Tom Cochrane talks with Gordon Lightfoot at an event promoting Lightfoot's new album. (CP /Adrian Wyld)TORONTO (CP) - Gordon Lightfoot worked the room like the veteran entertainer that he is.
More than 200 friends and music-industry associates gathered in the basement bar of Massey Hall on Monday afternoon to help him celebrate the launch of his new CD, Harmony. Looking gaunt but pleased, Lightfoot - in a black-leather jacket, cowboy boots and black jeans held up with suspenders - spoke modestly about the album's sales prospects.
"All of our albums don't just sell like hotcakes," he said. "They usually don't sell enough to have what you would call a windfall. But it's a nice thing to do because it makes you pay the bills."
The 65-year-old singer, still recovering from a serious medical ailment that felled him in 2002, explained that while many of the lyrics on Harmony sound like they were written after the incident that put him into a coma and then left him filled with self-pity, they had actually been penned two years earlier.
"I was going through one of life's little personal roller-coasters," he recalled. "I was going through a dip."
But he considers himself a pretty lucky guy, he said to a friendly crowd that included Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy, singer Joel Kroeker and blues guitarist Harry Manx.
Lightfoot recorded the studio tracks for the CD's 11 original songs prior to his illness, too. His band added the musical accompaniment later with Lightfoot himself overseeing the final mix with equipment brought into his Hamilton hospital bedroom.
The recordings range from the melancholy, like Sometimes I Wish, to the lighter Couchiching, all about his home town of Orillia, Ont., and which he sang to an audience there the night before he was stricken.
In September 2002, Lightfoot suffered a near-fatal abdominal hemorrhage and had to be rushed to hospital where he remained for three months - about six weeks of it in a coma when his life literally hung in the balance. He endured a series of operations, the most recent one in February, to treat the ruptured blood vessel. He was also given a tracheotomy but has insisted his vocal cords were not damaged by the procedure.
But he said his first test of the famous pipes will take place in late November.
He explained that he read a newspaper account of how he planned to perform a benefit concert then on behalf of the Hamilton hospital complex where doctors saved his life. He said it was news to him but decided that it's precisely what he would do.
"It will be a test for me and also a test for the people who worked on me."
JOHN MCKAY