The Canadian artist from small-town Ontario wrote and sang songs that reflected of his own life, but with an eye for universal appeal
Gordon Lightfoot died at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital on Monday evening. He was 84 years old. He had been suffering from emphysema and had recently cancelled his upcoming concerts. His family said he died peacefully of natural causes.
Perhaps that is the modesty of a “fair-haired farm boy from Orillia,” as The Globe and Mail’s John MacFarlane described the smalltown Ontarian in 1966. The title of that profile, one of the first major Lightfoot features ever published, was “Lyrical loner.” For a perfectionist prone to writer’s block, creating songs was a lonesome, laborious task. Fuelled by coffee, cigarettes and a fat commission, Lightfoot wrotein three days.
Lightfoot had his favourites, as do you, and as do I. The best of his music was also the best of the genre – wistful, evocative expressions that hooked the listener with melancholic melodies and kept them with vivid imagery. He looked at life through rain-beaded windows. The song title– “as we gaze off in the distance through the trees in my backyard” – was a word that described him.
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