Lightfoot to celebrate 50-year career during return trip to Amarillo
Posted: February 25, 2015 - 4:55pm
Folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot will return to Amarillo for an 8 p.m. Friday performance in the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Buchanan St. Lightfoot promised that he'll perform at least a dozen of his most famous hits, along with other favorites from throughout his 50-year solo career.
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Folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot will return to Amarillo for an 8 p.m. Friday performance in the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Buchanan St.
Lightfoot promised that he'll perform at least a dozen of his most famous hits, along with other favorites from throughout his 50-year solo career.
By Chip Chandler
chip.chandler@amarillo.com
After a half-century on the road, legendary folk singer Gordon Lightfoot isn’t nearly ready to call it quits.
“Absolutely not,” Lightfoot said in a recent phone interview to preview his return to Amarillo.
Lightfoot — who’ll perform at 8 p.m. Friday in the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Buchanan St. — isn’t even that crazy about the name of his latest tour, “50 Years of Highway.”
“I think that’s a slogan that our agent made up,” he said. “I don’t think of it in terms of time.”
And in that span, Lightfoot has written songs that will long outlast him, tunes like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “Rainy Day People,” “If You Could Read My Mind” and more.
Those songs are on the top of the list for any concert Lightfoot gives, too.
“We must have the 12,” Lightfoot said, running down those songs and a few others. “They’ve got to be in there. The rest of it, we rotate. We play with it.”
Lightfoot’s professional career began in 1965, but he began singing as a boy soprano in his native Ontario, then as part of a regionally successful barbershop quartet. After studying for a time in California, he returned to Toronto, where he began making a name for himself on the folk circuit.
“In the beginning ... I would cover lots of songs, and I would learn them pretty quickly, too,” he said. “I picked them out because I liked them or thought the audience would like them.
“I was writing my own stuff all the time and integrating it in with the cover stuff, and I finally got to the point where I was doing all my own stuff when I was about 30,” he said.
By that time, he had begun making a mark as a songwriter, with his compositions recorded by the likes of Elvis Presley, Marty Robbins and Peter, Paul and Mary.
“I suppose that was very fortunate that that happened,” Lightfoot said. “I sort of made my way into the industry by my songwriting initially, but I was also a performer. I played my guitar and we had a three-piece band.”
In 1965, he signed with United Artists, later finding even more success with Warner Bros., where he churned out hits like “Edmund Fitzgerald” and “Sundown.”
For the next few decades, Lightfoot continued writing and performing, and in 2002, he had begun production on his 20th album when he suffered a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, putting him into a six-week coma. Complications — including temporary hearing loss, difficulty with motor skills and vocal strain — kept him off-stage for 2˝ years, but he was able to finish the album, 2004’s “Harmony,” from his hospital bed.
Today, Lightfoot’s career is largely focused on live performances, with writing taking a backseat to spending time with his extended family.
“It doesn’t provide me with enough time ... and enough isolation (like) I had back in the old days,” he said.
“For 33 years, all I thought about was songwriting. ... I was under contract, I had a band, two families, living three or four different lives,” he said. “Sometimes the worlds collided, and it caused a lot of trouble, but I made my way through it.
“The emotionally traumatic events found their way into my writing, and it helped,” he said.
Now on his third marriage, Lightfoot said life is better than ever — one reason he’s not interested in hanging up his guitar.
“First of all, I love the work that I do,” he said. “I’m a very, very lucky man. I love the work that I do.
“I love the response we feel, I love the crowd, I love it,” he said. “As long as we’ve got the (audience), we’re gonna be doing it.”
http://amarillo.com/entertainment/ge...50-year-career
AMARILLO,Texas - Feb.27,2015
