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Lightfoot’s back in business with new album and major award
By Peter Robb, The Ottawa Citizen June 10, 2012 4:02 PM
Iconic Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot says he doesn’t have time to write songs these days because he is too busy touring.
Photograph by: John Major , The Ottawa Citizen - link..
Gordon Lighfoot
When: Friday, June 15, and Saturday, June 16, at 8 p.m.
Where: National Arts Centre
Tickets: $70 to $95.
www.ticketmaster.ca
At 73, Gordon Lightfoot has the singer/songwriter thing down to a finely calibrated art.
He knows how long his shows should be — two hours and five minutes with a 20-minute intermission (the five minutes is for an encore). No alarm clock needed — he just knows when the performance is over.
He knows how many tours he should do — five times a year, no more than 18 days on the road at a time.
Get up, go to the gym for “an hour and 45 minutes almost every day — weights, fast walking, stretches” — then off to the rehearsal studio, where he works with a talented group of musicians perfecting the songs he’ll perform.
That’s how he’s getting ready to perform in Ottawa June 15 and 16 at the National Arts Centre in what is for Lightfoot a regular pilgrimage. It’s a place he helped open almost 43 years ago.
This is a big year for Lightfoot. There is an exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology based around the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. He’s got a new album, a compilation disc called All Live, that is catching attention. And he’s just been named to the American Songwriters Hall of Fame — a signal honour.
“This songwriters award is a real shot in the arm for me. I’m impressed,” he says by telephone. He is going into the hall at a ceremony in New York on June 14 along with Detroit rocker Bob Seger, Don Schlitz (the country music writer of Kenny Rogers’ massive hit The Gambler), Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, the duo who wrote The Fantastiks, which is one of Broadway’s longest running shows, and Jim Steinman, who wrote all of Meat Loaf’s hits and Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. Lightfoot will join prestigious company that includes names such as Paul Simon, Carole King and Bruce Springsteen.
At the award ceremony in New York, he’ll play If You Could Read My Mind, perhaps his best-known song, for an audience that will have paid $1,000 a ticket. And he will hear Lyle Lovett perform another Lightfoot hit — Sundown. Lightfoot, who has won numerous awards and is in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, is tickled, in his understated way.
Then it’s back to business. He’ll hop on a plane and head to Ottawa focused on a 2 p.m. sound check, where the concert lineup will be ironed out.
“I like to get there early, get my instruments ready, tune up my guitars, that sort of thing. I like to get warmed up even before the sound check. We are getting almost the same sort of energy in the sound check as we get in the actual show,” so it’s important to be there ready to go.
It’s also a chance to work out some last-minute details.
“Every once in a while you have to clear some little things up, so we’re always nitpicking, ... always working on the fine-tuning.”
Discipline and routine. Lightfoot credits his workouts, which he says he started in 1982, with building the stamina that keeps him performing today. He says that physical preparation helped him survive and come back from an aortic aneurysm in 2002.
His new album, a compilation of songs recorded at Massey Hall in Toronto in the late 1990s, was put together with similar attention to detail. Listening to the tapes carefully, Lightfoot personally weeded out the performances down to a final slate of 19. All of this took, he says, four years to accomplish.
It was important to find mistake-free songs, he says. He did not want to go back and repair the songs through a remix. That would have dented their integrity as “live” recordings.
“I had it narrowed down to 30 takes at one point. Somebody said, ‘I guess you’re going to have a live album,’ and I said, ‘Nope, I’ll have to go back to find the ones with no mistakes in them. We want the live sound.’
“There are good takes of really good songs, padded up with some of the more ethereal things that I really like. I wish I could have put more on, but there were only 19 with no mistakes on them.”
The songwriting award comes at a time when Lightfoot is not writing songs anymore. He says he doesn’t have the time, given his busy touring schedule. He is always either getting ready to tour or on the road. Besides, he doesn’t have to write anymore. His contractual obligations ended long ago. He no longer needs to pump out albums.
“I did one independently just to prove to myself I could still do it, my Harmony album (released in 2004). I got sick halfway through it, so it was sort of half-baked but the songs are good.”
Now is the time for “fun.” He clearly loves everything about performing — travelling (within reason), rehearsing, working with good musicians on songs he cares about.
He also seems to have mellowed. Lightfoot still doesn’t talk much during his performances, but he says he is opening up more.
“I’m a lot looser. I try to be little bit more friendly, a little bit more forgiving.”
Maybe that comes with having his demise prematurely reported.
He says he was driving to work, listening to a radio show he regularly tuned in, when he heard If I Could Read Your Mind. When the song ended the announcer started to read his obituary. Lightfoot doesn’t carry a cellphone, so he couldn’t stop right there to correct the record. He raced to his office, phoned the show and was put on the air.
“It isn’t true,” he says he told the host Charles Adler. “It’s not so. I don’t know what happened.” Then he phoned his family.
Lightfoot can chuckle about the incident now, but it did have an impact.
“My daughter was quite disturbed by it and so was my son, who was on a train from Halifax to Montreal. My daughter had a good cry over it later that night.”
The next day his picture was on the front page of a Toronto newspaper with the headline “Dead Wrong.” He has kept that front page and has it in a prominent place in his Toronto home, on The Bridle Path. (Conrad Black is a neighbour.) “That was quite a kerfuffle,” he says in reflection.
But now he says he’s ready to play
“It’s so much fun to play this stuff. I have a very enthusiastic band, first-rate. (And) I love the work and I want to keep doing it.
“We are prepared and ready to do two great shows in Ottawa.”
Lightfoot has been here many times over the years, playing the legendary coffee house Le Hibou, once even playing a high school gym, and, of course, playing the NAC, a venue for which he has great respect.
“We are there every couple of years. It’s good, (but) we don’t want to overplay the area,” he says, tongue in cheek.
This time he is closing a series featuring Canadian artists called The NAC Presents.
He says there is a lot of great talent in the country; it just needs a chance to be heard. “How can they get started and what can they do to claw themselves up the totem pole? It’s like playing the lottery.
“I tell you there’s lots of good talent around. I get all kinds of stuff submitted to me and I listen to it all the time.” But it’s hard to make it, he says.
After Ottawa that carefree highway beckons.
“We’re going to Montreal and then down into farm country — Sarnia, Chatham, Kitchener. That’s where my relatives are.” His dad, Gordon Senior, hailed from the London area.
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