Nows and Forevers

If there are songs that help to tell the story of your life, then Gordon Lightfoot has one or two songs on my personal soundtrack.

For better or worse.

Looking over popular music over the past number of decades, there are some artists you don’t really understand why they became famous, and at the same time you thank God that they did.

Gordon Lightfoot, who died a Monday at age 84, was one of those artists.

It’s hard to believe, looking back over the course of 50-something years, that Lightfoot was as popular as he was in the 1960s and 1970s. His first solo hit, “If You Could Read My Mind,” is a multilayered and pained look at a broken marriage, written when his own first marriage was ending. Maybe his most famous song ever, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is about what might otherwise have been a long-forgotten Great Lakes shipwreck.

It’s hard to imagine in 2023 that either could have been the tremendous hits they were. But both were top five songs in the ’70s, with “Edmund Fitzgerald” reaching No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Lightfoot was a pioneer in folk and folk rock.

I have had Gord’s Gold as a record, a CD and then on my iPod and iPhone since the early 1980s. I am not ashamed to say it’s one of my favorite “best of” records, and I often played my dad’s other Gordon Lightfoot albums when I was a kid. What great songs:

“Sundown”
“Carefree Highway”
“Rainy Day People”
“Cold on the Shoulder”
“Cotton Jenny”

But my love of his earlier music was just as strong, as I have been listening to Peter, Paul and Mary for even longer. Two of their earlier hits, “For Lovin’ Me” and “Early Morning Rain,” we’re written by Lightfoot when he was a young songwriter, before he became famous.

Still love this line:

“You can’t jump a jet plane, like you can a freight train.”

And yet it’s more, as I go back to the soundtrack. Songs have meanings in your life, whether you realize it at the time or not. And “Carefree Highway” has hit me pretty hard in recent months, in a way it has never before.