""So what Lightfoot does is tour, honoring his audiences with his performances.""
http://www.salemnews.com/news/lifest...539028939.html
From 'Sundown' to 'Early Morning Rain;' Gordon Lightfoot to shine light on prolific songwriting career
Gordon Lightfoot to shine light on prolific songwriting career
By L. Kent Wolgamott Correspondent
Musicians can win all kinds of awards. But few find their way onto a stamp, one of the highest honors a nation can bestow on one of its artists.
That’s where Gordon Lightfoot landed in 2007 when the Canadian Post selected him, Anne Murray, Paul Anka and Joni Mitchell to have their names and images featured on stamps.
“That was great," Lightfoot said. "It was an honor. I don’t know how to say thank you, but to work on my craft and be ready to go out there and perform.”
So, at 77, Lightfoot continues to play about 70 shows a year. About a dozen of them are performed on an annual trip to the U.K. The rest are logged on 10- to- 12-show runs through parts of the U.S. and Canada, including his current tour that stops at The Cabot in Beverly Friday night.
The show, Lightfoot said, is a good one, two-plus hours of all the songs his fans want to hear as well as some lesser-known nuggets from his extensive catalog. He'll be joined by his four-piece band.
“We have a good, solid little band,” he said in a recent interview from his Toronto home. “It’s quite different than what you would think. It’s not folk. It’s more like folk-rock.”
The playlist naturally includes Lightfoot's enduring classics — “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — songs that continue to resonate after 40 years.
So what turns a song into a classic?
“I was taught it’s a combination of a good song, a great arrangement and a great vocal.” Lightfoot said. “The vocal is very, very important. What makes a song endure is its content and the level of performance on it. It’s got to be a really good song to have that kind of staying power and a great singer, the vocal, that’s the flagship.”
But a song also needs exposure before it can connect. And sometimes that doesn’t happen, he said.
“Songs don’t always pop right out. It can be a sleeper," Lightfoot said. “I had one album that sat for eight months before the song got pulled out."
That song was "If You Could Read My Mind,” which became Lightfoot’s breakthrough hit in 1970. By then, the 32-year-old had already spent more than half his life studying, writing and making music.
“I got really interested in music by the time I was in grade four in public school,” said Lightfoot, who grew up in Ontario. “I was about 10 years old when I started singing in public. I sang “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral,” the Irish lullaby, over the school public address system for Parents' Day. I had a vocal coach, I took piano lessons. I studied the keyboard."
A star track-and-field athlete and noseguard on the football team in high school, Lightfoot moved to Los Angeles in 1958 to study jazz composition and arrangement at Westlake College of Music. He supported himself by singing on demos and writing, arranging and playing on commercial jingles.
After returning to Canada, Lightfoot settled in Toronto, the home of Canada’s music industry. He eventually landing a job writing and arranging scores for 15- and 18-piece orchestras that performed on the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Lightfoot became a fixture in the local folk clubs, producing a pair of hits in Toronto and Montreal and traveling to Europe, where he ended up hosting BBC-TV’s “Country and Western Show” for a year.
By 1965, Lightfoot had become known as a songwriter. His “Early Morning Rain,” recorded by Ian and Sylvia Tyson, then Peter, Paul & Mary, started a run that saw his compositions performed by Marty Robbins, Judy Collins, Richie Havens and The Kingston Trio.
He’d also signed a record deal himself and in 1966 released his debut “Lightfoot!,” which contained many of his early hits. That album and the four that followed made Lightfoot a star in Canada.
But it wasn’t until he moved to Warner Bros. Records, which finally recognized him as a singer as well as songwriter, resulting in “If You Could Read My Mind” becoming a hit single in the U.S. The song is about Lightfoot's failed first marriage, which ended in 1973.
“As my first marriage failed, I was able to devote all my time to songwriting,” Lightfoot said. “It’s a very isolating experience, writing songs. You have to shut people out of your life. I had to work very hard at it.”
Lightfoot made nine albums in the 1970s, records that included the chart-topping “Sundown” and the account of the 1975 sinking of a ship in Lake Superior, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
He continued to write and record albums through the 1980s and ‘90s until he suffered an abdominal aneurysm in 2002. He’s released just two albums since then — 2004’s “Harmony” and a 2012 live disc.
Now a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Lightfoot no longer writes new songs.
“I can write more stuff, but I’m not under contract, so I have no obligation,” he said. “And I know how it feels to sell records in the millions. I learned how to do that in the ‘70s and I appreciate it.”
So what Lightfoot does is tour, honoring his audiences with his performances.
IF YOU GO
What: Gordon Lightfoot in concert
When: Friday, Sept. 16, 8 p.m.; doors open at 7 p.m.
Where: The Cabot, 286 Cabot St., Beverly
Cost: Tickets $49 to $75.
More information: For tickets, call 866-811-4111; for general questions, call 978-927-3100; or visit thecabot.org.
BEVERLY Mass. September 16,2016
