http://www.uticaod.com/article/20151105/NEWS/151109685
By PETER FRANCHELL
Posted Nov. 5, 2015 at 3:26 PM
UTICA
Gordon Lightfoot has had a long career.
Spanning five decades, the Canadian singer-songwriter has received 16 Juno awards (the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy Award), has been nominated for five Grammy Awards and won countless other awards for his prolific music.
You’ll get a chance to experience it live as he takes the stage at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Stanley Center for the Arts.
Lightfoot started writing music while still in high school and moved to the United States in the early 1950s to study music at Westlake College of Music in California. In 1960, he missed Canada and returned to work on his music.
Although he had hits in Canada, his first international success came in 1971 with “If You Could Read my Mind.” A poetic song about love and loss, it set the tone for what Lightfoot calls “folk music, but not traditional.” As Lightfoot straddled the lines between folk, folk-rock and country music, he helped define the folk-pop sound of the ’60s and ’70s.
His next hit, reaching No.1 on the Billboard charts, was “Sundown,” released in 1974. This song, as Lightfoot explained, was about a relationship he had with Cathy Smith, later more infamously known for her involvement in the 1982 drug-related death of actor John Belushi.
“It was written very quickly in the back of my house,” Lightfoot said in a phone interview. It’s this introspective approach to the lyrical content of his music that sets Lightfoot apart from his contemporaries, drawing more from inward inspiration rather than from the outside world.
“You have to love the work and be happy to maintain (yourself). I love the work, and that I can still do it, I feel lucky,” he said.
For the 76 year old Lightfoot, to “maintain (yourself)” involves an exercise regiment that allows him to “stay prepared (with) physical conditioning and play (guitar) everyday.” This allows him to get his music heard the traditional way.
As Lightfoot puts it, “the best way to do it is by the sweat of your brow … and tour.”
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