https://www.cbc.ca/music/in-gordon-l...eeMzYhitegrVcc
In Gordon Lightfoot's songbook, art is for everyone
How the songwriter’s utilitarian approach to inspiration proved beauty belongs to all of us
Andrea Warner · CBC Music · Posted: May 02, 2023 1:14 PM EDT | Last Updated: May 2
For Gordon Lightfoot, there was never a right or wrong way to draw inspiration. He was a prolific, award-winning songwriter who made meaning out of the mundane and observed the macro and micro of everyday in his lyrics and lines. He turned a commission into a Canadian classic, a breaking news story into the "best song" he ever wrote, and a stolen glance at an Arizona road sign into a hit song.
"You can start with a title if you want, or go fishing for words in a magazine, like People magazine or something, you'll see an ad with some fancy language to it," Lightfoot told CBC Music in 2013. "I've done that, honestly, I've even gone into a paint store and picked up the titles of paint samples."
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Lightfoot was not an overly precious writer, a cultured aesthete wrenching words and phrases from a head stuffed full of canonical greats. Instead, Lightfoot's omnivorous approach to creation made him an accidental disrupter of the highbrow, a brilliant songwriter subverting the vaunted purity of divine artistic genius.
"I'm a fairly normal sort of person," he said in a 1975 interview. "I'm not particularly smart and I'm not particularly stupid. Maybe it's the general normality of it, with a touch of art."
Lightfoot may not have set out to democratize the playing field with his unpretentious approach to music, but the staying power of his songs acts as radical permission for other aspiring writers and artists. The source of the inspiration doesn't matter; it's what you do with it that counts.
Lightfoot died on May 1, 2023. This year also marks the 65th anniversary of Lightfoot's foray from Orillia, Ont., to Los Angeles to study music composition and the beginning of his "official" music career (even though he'd been singing and performing since his youth). Lightfoot wrote his first song in 1955 but it would be a full decade of playing and performing before he shifted to sets comprising mostly his own tunes. "I didn't have to rely on my own material at the beginning," Lightfoot told American Songwriter in 2008. "There were so many good songs around that I kept learning them."
Rain, planes and trains
But in 1965, that all changed. Lightfoot began performing his own songs, and other bands began recording them. By the time he released his debut album, Lightfoot!, in 1966, the record's biggest success, "Early Morning Rain," had already been a hit for Ian & Sylvia and Peter, Paul and Mary. Lightfoot once called it "the most important song I've ever written," and estimated that it was nine years in the making. The inspiration came years earlier during his time in Los Angeles when, in a fit of homesickness, he went to the airport to watch the planes come and go. It was in the morning, and, yes, it was raining.
In the early morning rain with a dollar in my hand
With an aching in my heart and my pockets full of sand
I'm a long way from home and I miss my loved ones so
In the early morning rain with no place to go
Lightfoot abided by a key rule of good writing: "Show, don't tell." He didn't specifically say he was broke and lonely in L.A., but the "dollar in his hand" and "pockets full of sand" and "no place to go" conveyed his situation perfectly.
On his second record, 1967's The Way I Feel, Lightfoot showcased his ability to thrive creatively under commission. CBC tasked Lightfoot with writing a song that would celebrate the history of the country for the Canadian Centennial, which would kick off with a televised event on New Year's Day, 1967. According to scholar Chris Hemer, since Lightfoot had already written a couple songs about trains at that point, CBC suggested something on the Canadian Pacific Railway and recommended a book from the CBC library on William Cornelius Van Horne, who designed Canada's first transcontinental railway. Lightfoot wrote "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" in just three days, and it quickly became one of the country's most celebrated folk songs, though its legacy has been recontextualized over the years.
Given the source material and the purpose of the commission, it's not surprising that "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" embraces a certain kind of nationalism. Lightfoot does reference the lives lost in the building of the CPR, but the lack of specifics contribute to Canadian myth-making. There's no mention of the settler-colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous people who were displaced and whose lands were stolen, nor the more than 15,000 exploited Chinese migrants who helped build the railroad — and an estimated 600 of whom were killed on the job. In a video essay about the song, journalist Nick Lefevre acknowledges the CPR was "a feat in engineering and it did change the country, but from a humanitarian perspective, it was a tragedy and a crime."
Love undone
Lightfoot also mined his own relationships and love affairs for inspiration and catharsis.
"In some cases the songs are autobiographical; some events and traumas that have to get handled, one way or another, go into the tunes," Lightfoot said in a 1998 interview. "And it's easier and cheaper than going to a shrink."
"If You Could Read My Mind" is one of those songs, written in the midst of the breakup of his first marriage. He had a new home on a small farm in the country, a new record label, and he was drinking "quite a bit." (He quit in 1982.) The song is a series of devastating lines that capture the haunted longing and bittersweet aftertaste of a breakup.
If I could read your mind love, what a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartache come
The hero would be me, but heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the ending's just too hard to take
It's a song written from the perspective of a narrator not quite ready to contend with their own accountability, who masks his willful ignorance in a performance of vulnerability. But Lightfoot's own child called him on this early on. "There's a line in the song that goes, 'If you read between the lines, you'll know that I'm just trying to understand, the feeling that you lack.' My daughter, who was just a girl at the time, heard the song and asked me, 'Don't you lack any feelings, daddy?' She got me to change the line to 'the feelings that we lack.' She said I was putting the whole onus of the divorce on her mother."
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