http://www.thestar.com/entertainment...article/421195
'I don't call upon the voice until it's needed'
In rehearsals for this week's four-night stay at Massey Hall, singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot is keeping his sights on making the most of the music
May 04, 2008 04:30 AM
Ashante Infantry
Pop & Jazz Critic
He may be a legend, but Gordon Lightfoot is still honing his craft like a newcomer.
"We're refining the presentation of the music," said the Orillia native of his weekly rehearsals with long-time accompanists at his Toronto home.
"We're working on intonation, tuning ... they play the music well and the better I play it, the better they play it. So I have to hold up my end and I keep practising and I keep working on it.
"I'm concentrating on my concert performances, because that's what I did for the first five years of my career before there were any recording contracts," Lightfoot said.
"I played bars, clubs and coffee houses. I learned how to perform at that time to the best of my ability and got my first recording contract in 1965. I remained under contract for 33 years to record companies. During that time I made 19 albums."
Holding court in a downtown hotel suite in advance of his four-night Massey Hall residency this week, the soft-spoken entertainer said the one thing he doesn't have to prepare is his trademark burr.
"I'm very lucky that way. I don't call upon the voice until it's needed. I keep the lungs and the voice working well with quite a severe physical exercise routine – weight training, stretches, fast walking – I incorporated into my life in 1980 at the same time I gave up alcohol.
"I've been able to summon adrenalin from this activity. I'll be 70 this year and I can get a lot of energy going onstage and people I think will be able to recognize that."
With no record company contract to satisfy, Lightfoot rarely turns out new lyrics these days.
"It could be described as a hobby. I enjoy more working on the instruments and working on the songs that we already have and trying to inject some of the older ones that we know they really want to hear like `If Children Had Wings,' which is one they'd been yelling out, wanting us to play. We play it this year. We've got some great older songs that are sitting on the back burner."
But one track that he'll never again perform in concert, or otherwise, is "For Loving Me."
"Oh, that's a terrible song," said Lightfoot of the kiss-off song, with its line "I got a hundred more like you.
"That's a song that I wrote before I understood what the word chauvinist meant. I stopped singing that one many, many years ago. That's probably the one that I hate the most. The reason it did well with Peter, Paul & Mary is because Peter Yarrow is a very gifted orchestrator, and basically the leader of that group took the song and made an arrangement of it that made the lyric work so that it didn't sound so chauvinistic any more.
"The song really did well on the charts: at one point it was up to No. 5 on Billboard. The incurably romantic side of my character was brought forth in that song, but it certainly is not one of my favourites."
Of those there are several — "Sundown," ``Cotton Jenny," "If You Could Read My Mind" and of course, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
"It's a wonderful song," said the author. "I love to listen to it. It takes a lot of time and its got wonderful guitar solos in it and great music."
Toronto STAR article-May 4, 2008
