Gordon Lightfoot's Lifetime of Achievements

It's a real shame SHADOWS and DREAM STREET ROSE are so hard to find these days.

 

Agreed because they are classic Lightfoot, right up there with the big sellers of the catalog.

 

I have a number of LPs and CDs, but my fav is Old Dan's Records. I also have a DVD of his Reno concert that is good.

 

Another great album.

 

Gord is an enormous talent. He basically never made a bad album, I'd say he recorded two below par ones in his whole catalogue and the rest are excellent.

He also had an interesting emotional/love life that is reflected in his work and to be lends a lot of his songs a depth and poignancy.

All of his albums, even the obscure ones, were in print and easily available until very recently. I'm surprised to see Dream Street Rose is now so expensive.

I'd gladly lead a Lightfoot album by album thread if anyone is interested!

 

Has any one written his biography? Probably not authorized, but interesting no doubt.

 

A couple were written about twenty or thirty years ago as far as I know. Someone recently wrote a sort of imagined biography based on imagined conversations!

 

Let's do it. I was fortunate enough to have met him in Orillia a number of times.

 

Ok, I will start in a day or two!

 

Nice!

 

Love the man and his music! We really really need some Lightfoot in some kind of Hi-rez release!!
So many to choose from: Sundown, Summertime Dream, Shadows, Dream Street Rose, and of course
his U.A. era of material which I like because of it's simple arrangements and darkness of his lyrics.
My first choice would be Sundown, but he has such a large body of work a 'best-of' would be good
to have.

 

Superb songwriter that deserves a lot more recognition that he gets (at least outside Canada). A very kind man with a great sense of humor too - a couple years ago there was a "Lightfoot dead" news story that went out and one of Canada's major talk show guys mentioned the story....Gord was listening and called in - priceless.

 

Gordon Lightfoot is a treasure......


This 4 cd box set is fantastic, I play something from it at least 2 -3 times a month. What a song writer.

 

Gordon Lightfoot is a treasure.......

So much of Gordons cds sound great, it would be hard to remake a Hi-rez better enough to make it worth the money.

 

20 years or so ago, a good friend loaned me his copy of Shadows, insisting that I just had to hear this record-I 'd heard only the major hits from Sundown but this got under my skin in a big way, and I haunted the used record stores until I found my own copy. I've since collected everything he's ever released as well as the live Reno DVD. A true master in song craft, one of the greatest musicians to come out of Canada. If You Could Read my Mind, Sundown, Don Quixote, Summerside of Life , a Shadows and Old Dan's records are treasured friends I return to again and again.

 

I think Shadows is his best album. So solid from start to finish. Picked up the CD reissue on the first day of release back in 2002 because I had long ago wore out the grooves of the vinyl. Can't believe it flopped on original release back in '82.

That being said, "Summer Side Of Life" is the best song he's ever done. The vocal harmonies on that one...damn.

 

Count me in as agreeing with you both. Every song is strong. Great musical performances captured by brilliant engineering. I'm a Gord completist--CD and vinyl. When I went to his concert at a local, small theater venue in early 2000, "Shadows" was the LP cover I took with me to ask him to sign. He signed it in gold gel ink. I shook the man's hand and told him that "Shadows" is a great album. That was a good moment for me.

 

Gordon Lightfoot: 10 things you might not know about him
Music legend Gordon Lightfoot opens up on Reddit.
http://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...t_10_things_you_might_not_know_about_him.html
Canadian singing legend Gordon Lightfoot opened up on Reddit on everything from Elvis to Justin Bieber to the Trailer Park Boys and his chances in a fight with children’s performer Fred Penner.


By: Peter Edwards Star Reporter, Published on Fri Aug 22 2014

 

Some of his live recordings that have floated around on the internet really should be released i.e Montreux 76. The version of "the Auctioneer" is astonishing.

 

From the linked article:
On his inspiration for writing “Sundown”: “Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home, at my desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin’!”

According to the book Wired, by Bob Woodward, Gordon's former "girlfriend" was Cathy Smith, the woman who later went to jail for her role in the drug-related death of John Belushi.

 

That's certainly the case, in fact Smith's vocals can be heard on a couple of Sundown tracks.

 

That box set is always near the CD players in my house. Fantastic collection.

 

Most of Gord's vinyl can be found in pretty good shape with good sound quality especially The Summer Side Of Life which is an audiophile favorite.

But is there a copy on earth of Endless Wire that plays quietly? I even bought a sealed copy a few years ago that was noisier than hell.

 

That's great. Not only does Burton sound like him in this clip, but manages to almost look like him.

 

I have all of his albums except A Painter Passes Through and the most recent live album. If he's ever written a bad song, I've never heard it. He works very hard at his craft of marrying the perfect lyric to the perfect melody. A consummate songwriter. IMO, he has a few equals as a songwriter but no one does it better.