Gordon Lightfoot - United Artists Collection [2 CD Set]

This two-disc, 49-song collection combines Lightfoot's first four albums into one specially priced package and offers a comprehensive look at the Canadian singer-songwriter before he achieved pop stardom. These late-1960s recordings are more pared down than his better-known 1970s work, showing Lightfoot to be a thoughtful songwriter who was equally comfortable with personal love songs and more political fare. A much stronger folkie sensibility is on display here, which may be a revelation to those only familiar to his glossier folk-pop work, but a boon to his longtime followers. --Marc Greilsamer Amazon.com essential recording

The pure Lightfoot

When I was in grade school I had a teacher who would bring in his guitar from time to time and start strumming Gordon Lightfoot songs, such as "Early Morning Rain". When the 1970's arrived Lightfoot issued his biggest hits like "Sundown", "If You Could Read My Mind" and "Edmund Fitzgerald", but his 1960's UA collection here is what's best and most pure about his music.

One can see Gord travelling across Canada with a guitar slung around his shoulder, singing about steel rails, majestic mountains, the fleeting loves of a roving musician and so on. When I first heard the original version of "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" it sounded much folkier and less polished than the Gord's Gold reissue I was more familiar with. Yet once I heard the original version several times I was captured by it.

There are many great nuggets here. "If I Could" and "The Way I Feel" have a brooding wistfulness to them, and there's no better music to listen to when driving through Northern Ontario than songs like "Steel Rail Blues" and "Ribbon of Darkness". "Go Go Round" and "For Lovin' Me" makes me think of Toronto's Yonge St. in those heady days of the late 60's when the music scene here was so vibrant.

For those only familiar with Gord's greatest hits of the 1970's, this is a worthwhile journey into the music that made him a big name in Canada before that. April 6, 2008

Gordon LIghtfoot is great

This ia a great CD of Gordon Lightfoot's best. If you like him even a little, you will like him a lot more after one listen. I've bought this CD for some friends already. Get it; you'll be glad. March 23, 2008

Hold On To Gord's Gold...

...for Cold On the Shoulder, Sundown, and Don Quixote, but this album here will quickly supplant all previous attempts to box or anthologize Gordo's early work. No lush strings, no overdubbed country choruses, just the pure unadulterated Lightfoot shining through the original complete songtracks of Lightfoot!, The Way I Feel, Sunday Concert, Did She Mention My Name, and Back Here On Earth. As a matter of fact, the complete canon, as the MacDonalds, of Osnabrook, Ontario, whom I stayed with in December of 1971, recommended to me. I can't tell you how great it is to hear the original of Rosanna, and Steel Rail Blues, amongst all the others, in their pristine original state--I've been hating those strings on the Gord's Gold CD just that long, and pining for these which I only had in vinyl. Too much here to give any but a generalist overview, and to say the sound is better than ever before, along with pix of a very young Lightfoot which explain his being a long-time heartthrob of those who have unlimited access to Labatt's 50, and around the world, even here where we have to settle for Busch at times. This will make someone very happy when they find it in their stocking this Christmas. December 19, 2007

The most essential Lightfoot recordings

This is Lightfoot at his best, his songs from 1966-1968, when he was 27-29 years old and still belonged to Canada, not to the world. These four early albums, in their entirety, reflect a simpler time, when the elements of music (songwriting, playing and singing) were more craft than production. His voice never sounded better, quivering with an effortless, natural vibrato that gradually decreased over subsequent albums. The songs are as good as any he ever wrote, and the three written by others are equally good: "Changes" by Phil Ochs, "Pride of Man" by Hamilton Camp, and "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by Ewan McColl. (Lightfoot's recording of "First Time" predates Roberta Flack by 5 years).

Lightfoot's Canadian-ness is explicit in songs like "Crossroads" and "Canadian Railroad Trilogy", but also present in many of the songs that use natural imagery of winter, woods, cold rain, withered leaves, long rivers and delicate, fleeting springs, summers and falls. His roots are in a mostly rural area about 100 miles north of Toronto where such country abounds. His lyrics cross south of the border on "Black Day in July", describing the 1967 Detroit riot like a breathless reporter with an acute sense of poetry. As a traveling singer/guitarist with smashing good looks, one can only assume his many songs to or about women are drawn to some degree from experience. They range from the kiss-offs "Oh, Linda" and "For Lovin' Me", the homey comfort of "Rosana" to the longing of "The Last Time I Saw Her" and "Affair on 8th Avenue". Then there's the girl breaking away from her mother in "Does Your Mother Know?", the nameless woman who sent him a train ticket home that he gambled away in "Steel Rail Blues", and the hometown sweetheart of "Did She Mention My Name?" The pleasures and pains of the road is another Lightfoot theme, and "Long Thin Dawn" leads this category. It also gives us a peek at a country music idiom that has been more prevalent on Lightfoot's recent recordings.

Lightfoot's melodies are simple but never dull. Instrumentally, most of these songs have just two acoustic guitars and an acoustic bass - sometimes less, sometimes a little more - the cello on "A Minor Ballad", for example, is inspired. Lightfoot and fellow-guitarist Red Shea are very skilled at their instruments, and the performances are raw, uncluttered, with only small orchestral touches on some tracks, especially from his third album. The interplay of woodwinds and strings on "Pussywillows" is especially nice, as are the strings on "Does Your Mother Know?" and "The Last Time I Saw Her". These strings embellish the music, unlike much 70s music where string backgrounds formed a kind of uniform sentimental mash that detracted from the artistry (or lack thereof) of the musicians. Take Lightfoot's own "Carefree Highway" from 1974, for example. It's a great song, one of my favorites, but notice how the strings subtract from the performance. Here they add.

If you are a Lightfoot fan, no greatest hits compilation can possibly negate your need for this album. The "Gord's Gold" compilation comes in for special criticism for its inferior remakes of many of the songs here, complete with "sentimental mash" strings. But even if the songs hadn't been remade, too many of the best ones would still be missing. Nothing but the whole of these recordings would ever do. November 18, 2007

Lightfoot is the Beatles of the great north west

This first 4 album set clears away any misconception about the artistic depth of this poet. Adding to the grandure of the songs is his golden voice that at times seems wild like a cyote howling at the moon. And the humility in the verse is stunning.
"If I could sing like the poets and kings of this world, If I could rise like the wind or the tides of the sea, I would sing you to sleep my love with sweet melodie, and let you dream away till the morning light returned again to take you away from me."
July 24, 2007

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