In Gordon Lightfoot's songbook, art is for everyone

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."

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." 

The title track of his 1974 album, Sundown, is another song inspired by Lightfoot's volatile love life. The music has a darkly rhythmic groove, irresistible and insistent, and the words convey an urgency and tension that skew toward the sinister. 

I can see her looking fast in her faded jeans
She's a hard loving woman, got me feeling mean
Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain
Sundown you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs

The "muse" behind "Sundown" was Lightfoot's then-girlfriend Cathy Smith. According to Lightfoot, one night Smith went out partying with her friends, leaving him home alone, restless, jealous and watching the sunset. He channelled his frustration into writing "Sundown." But according to several publications, including the Globe and Mail, Lightfoot's jealousy turned to violence at least once when he allegedly broke Smith's cheekbone during a fight.

Breaking news

Within the first decade of his solo career, Lightfoot released 10 studio albums. During this time, his record labels also released six compilations of his greatest hits and best songs. The most successful, by far, was 1975's Gord's Gold, a sprawling double vinyl featuring 22 of his most popular tracks. Many of these songs are considered foundational to the Canadian music canon. But one of the biggest and most surprising hits of Lightfoot's career was still to come. 

Lightfoot released "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in 1976, a re-telling of the tragic real-life sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior, Nov. 10, 1975, which claimed the lives of all 29 people on board. "I saw the story on TV, about five hours after it happened, so I collected every newspaper for the next couple of weeks and the song came out," said Lightfoot, who wrote and recorded the song in a rare one-week burst. "It's basically a straightforward account of how the events actually unfolded." 

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck saying
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven PM a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good to know ya
The captain wired in he had water coming in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Writing: a life's work

Most of Lightfoot's songs were written over months, sometimes years, and he devoted decades of his life to the practice. In a 2010 interview, Lightfoot assigned a numerical value to his songwriting process, telling the Montrealer that it was "15 per cent inspiration and 85 per cent perspiration. I will stand by that — it's hard work. Writing is a solitary process, and it can be exciting and draining at the same time. I wrote songs under contract for 33 years, and now I can relax a little and focus on our performances."

In another 2010 interview, Lightfoot described recording 20 albums under contract as "pretty rough work… That caused a lot of the bumpiness too, because it caused me to be isolated and cut myself off from my people and my kids, so I could work on the songs. I wanted to do it because by that time I was supporting a band, was supporting a crew, and had acquired two or three children. But I don't regret any of it."

Lightfoot was under contract and writing was his job. I have always appreciated his matter-of-fact honesty about spending 33 years and 20 albums doing that work and the effort that he put into it, that it was thrilling, isolating and exhausting. It was also labour. He couldn't afford to be too high-and-mighty to turn up his nose at People magazine or to make a trip to the paint store to find what he was looking for in "Bitter Green" (just a guess on my part).

But in that work, in these songs, we see how beauty — or the illusion of it — can be coaxed from violence and tragedy, the mundane, the everyday and the unexpected. For 65 years, he showed us how beauty belongs to all of us, not just the classically educated or the affluent and cultured. Art is for everybody in the landscape of Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits.