Creating Songs with Gordon Lightfoot

Rush's Geddy Lee called Gordon Lightfoot a timeless songwriter. Robbie Robertson of The band calls Gordon Canada’s national treasure. His longtime friend, Bob Dylan, inducted Lightfoot into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame calling him one of his favourite songwriters and has often been quoted saying that when he hears a Gordon Lightfoot song, he wishes it would go on forever.

Early Morning Rain, The Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Carefree Highway, Sundown, If You Could Read My Mind, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  The list goes on and on and on.  Gordon Lightfoot is Canada's greatest songwriter. Period. His professional career began over 6o years ago and he's influenced countless popular artists over the years and he’s still at it.  In 2020 he released Solo, his twenty-first album and he’s hoping to get back out on tour as soon as the COVID pandemic is taken care of. I reached Gordon over the phone to see if I could get some insight into his songwriting process and given how long he’s been at it, I thought that the most obvious first question was "Is songwriting still fun for you?"

Gordon Lightfoot: Yeah, you know, it’s fun if you see that it's going somewhere that you like.  Then you think about ‘how would this go over in a crowd.’ And so, you think about that for a while and if it seems like it might have a chance that it might bite, you go ahead and finish it.  And some of it you don’t finish. But you’ve got to at least know that they’re going to like it.  That they’re going to be able to make sense out of it. And even then you’ll only use one or two songs off an album. You get the best ones.  The ones that have the best forward momentum. 

Steve Waxman: How do you determine that?

For the full transcript go to: imstevewaxman.com

If you want to find out more about the life of Gordon Lightfoot, I highly recommend Nicholas Jennings excellent biography simply called Lightfoot.  There is also a great documentary film called Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind. For updated news and tour information, check out gordonlightfoot.com

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