A challenge, but I think I got it:
Gordon Lightfoot is the heart and soul of Canadian popular music. Is, not was. His popularity peaked by the late 70s when he’d written more than 500 songs, recorded by the likes of Ian and Sylvia, Peter Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan and Harry Belafonte, and had such hits as “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
His annual Massey Hall concerts are legendary, selling out no less than nine nights in 1978. Record sales have dwindled since then but his importance has, if anything, only increased as he approaches his 54th birthday, November 17.
Born in Orillia, Ont., but a resident of Toronto’s Rosedale district for years, he remains a one-of-a-kind craggy Canadian ideal, something like pop’s equivalent of Tom Thomson; an artist obsessed with pinpointing exactly what we’re about, yet aware of the fleeting background.
Lightfoot is blatantly sentimental in many ways, old-fashioned and nostalgic too. Yet he rarely strikes an emotional false note.
That is no accident. Great struggle, pain and self-imposed pressure have gone into even the most artlessly simple-sounding phrases, like the heart-grabbing, slowed-down middle section of the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” - something with the natural eloquence of a traditional folk song.
It seems as if it has been part of the country forever - like Lightfoot himself.
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