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Canadian Gordon Lightfoot makes a rare Stateside visit
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Email this story | Print By BILL DeYOUNG
bill.deyoung@scripps.com
February 8, 2006
He's one of the most lauded songwriters of our generation, but Gordon Lightfoot is first, foremost and always a Canadian.
Lightfoot has been awarded the Order of Canada, his homeland's most prestigious honor, and the equally significant Governor General's Award.
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No wonder he never moved to Los Angeles, like his brethren Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, or New York, like Leonard Cohen. He didn't have to.
"I've always recorded here in Toronto," says Lightfoot in a telephone interview. "It became such a good place to record that they used to fly the engineer and producer up here from L.A. to do our basic tracks with us."
Lightfoot, who will perform with his band Thursday at Mizner Park in Boca Raton, made his name in America via such classics as "If You Could Read My Mind," "Sundown" (a No. 1 hit) and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (No. 2). He also wrote the modern folk classics "Early Morning Rain" and "For Lovin' Me."
Since he burst onto the scene in the mid '60s, all he's needed was an H-1 work visa. These days, at 67, he plays just 50 shows a year in this country.
"It wasn't necessary to pull up stakes and do it as some of the others had to do, because my management was in New York," Lightfoot says, "and between them and the record company, they handled all my business south of the border."
Lightfoot suffered a severe abdominal hemorrhage in 2002 — he was in a coma for six weeks — but says he's feeling fit as the proverbial fiddle these days.
And, he enthuses, he absolutely loves playing in front of American audiences.
Out of the hundreds of songs he's written, Lightfoot's personal favorites aren't the tunes that were necessarily big hits.
"I have one called 'East of Midnight' that I really thought was a good one, and another one called 'A Passing Ship,'" he says. "And several that I do in my show that really stand up well before an audience.
"'If You Could Read My Mind' is a really good one, too, and I can get a great performance now on that one, a much greater performance than I gave originally on it. It's a great one to sing, really a fun, solid tune to play onstage."
If you go
Who: Gordon Lightfoot
Where: Mizner Park Amphitheatre, U.S. 1 at Plaza Real, Boca Raton
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
Tickets: $45-$60
Contact: (561) 750-1668
