Gordon Lightfoot’s Melodies, Poetic Lyrics Remain Among Best
Gordon Lightfoot Thursday, June 12, Spokane Opera House
Gordon Lightfoot is one of those timeless performers, unaffected by fashion, whose 10th Spokane Opera House appearance probably didn’t differ in most significant ways from his first.
Tenth? Did I say 10th? Yes, Thursday’s show pushed Lightfoot into double figures for this building, which must be close to a record for one artist.
For the most part, Thursday’s show was exactly what we had come to expect from a Lightfoot performance. This folk troubadour smoothly worked his way through two sets of songs from his three-decade repertoire, including most of the songs that casual fans would be most familiar with: “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
His poetic and literate lyrics remain Lightfoot’s chief appeal, coupled with exceptionally beautiful and sometimes even stately melodies. As I listened on Thursday, it struck me once again that Lightfoot is among the best in the business at writing about nature, and writing about history.
His two most striking nature songs came back-to-back: “Ode to Big Blue,” a song about a blue whale which lived at the turn of the century, and “Restless,” a song which uses nature imagery (“the wild goose will be on her way, the weather’s much too cold”) to describe an indescribable feeling of restlessness inherent in people’s souls.
His two best history songs were “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” both of which are deservedly famous. He and his four-piece band did an especially good job on the trilogy, a song that probably taught more Canadian history to Americans than any textbook. Without this song, I never would have known what “muskeg” is, or where “Gaspe” is.
As for the “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I’m not sure there has ever been a Top 10 song with imagery to match his description of the storm (“The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound … ‘twas the witch of November come stealin”’).
Also, Lightfoot and his longtime band members, particularly Barry Keane on drums, Rick Haynes on bass and Terry Clements on guitar, are skilled at building drama into a song.
However, I was a bit concerned at a few alarming signs that Lightfoot’s best performing days are behind him. His voice occasionally slipped into an adenoidal whine, especially on some of the high passages. His articulation of the lyrics left a lot to be desired, which is a shame since his words are so vital. On a few songs, he forgot a verse or two.
On Thursday, the Opera House was barely half-full, a far cry from Lightfoot in his heyday. But heyday or not, Lightfoot is still worth hearing.
, DataTimes