In his country song "Heaven Don't Deserve Me", which he recorded in 1972 and only released in 1999, Gordon Lightfoot draws a preliminary balance of his life, which, however, is extremely fragmentary: He has not the slightest idea what he was sent here for, but overall he enjoys it. He had experienced good and evil, behaved right or wrong, he didn't care what people thought about it. And if it wasn't enough for heaven later, it wouldn't have deserved it anyway.
Tilman Spreckelsen
Editor in the feuilleton.
- Follow I follow
At that time, Lightfoot, born on November 17, 1938 in a small settlement in Ontario, was just under 34 years old and not yet ready for a conclusion. However, he had already felt his finiteness as a teenager, when he had collapsed into the ice in the harsh Canadian winter and barely survived. As a result, his existence had also been rich in upheavals: the member of the church choir of his congregation won a singing competition as half a child, recorded a record and from then on appeared on stage more often. He learned to play the guitar, wrote his first songs, sang in a school band and, when he was thrown out, founded a new one. He teamed up with a friend to form the duo "The Two-Timers", some of whom have survived, and went to Los Angeles at the age of eighteen to study music and make his big break.
It was still a few years in coming, but Ligthfoot had taken the path there with his typical mixture of diligence, adaptability and genius. He soaked up what the pop music of the fifties and sixties had to offer, especially his singing style in those years is still characterized by a somewhat exaggerated vibrato, which gives his baritone a certain brashness. As a songwriter, he provided material for Elvis Presley and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others, and he is also a child of his time, albeit a highly gifted one – on "For Lovin' Me", for example, he was later reluctant to be approached and only then made his peace with the "most chauvinistic song ever written" (Lightfoot), when it occurred to him that one did not necessarily have to assume a male perspective for the cruel lines sung there. Incidentally, the song, which has been covered many times, did not harm his career, on the contrary.
From insider tip to multi-covered star
His early albums – the debut "Lightfoot!" came out in 1966, when he had long since established himself in the folk scene with many performances – contain great material that was basically written and recorded for a singer and an exquisitely played acoustic guitar. Later, his songs in the studio unfortunately often received an acoustic superstructure that often did not do them justice: indulgent strings as a basic evil of the sixties and seventies, and at least such an excellently composed song as Lightfoot's "Approaching Lavender" from the record "Sit Down Young Stranger" drowns in such a mush of sound. Other pieces, on the other hand, benefit from productions that still strike a chord today – the discreet medieval décor in "Circle Of Steel", for example, which actually counters the shabbiness of the environment described in the song with the rats that behave as if everything belongs to them with recorders, bells and dignified choral singing.