How Gordon Lightfoot’s daughter saved his 1970 masterpiece and career with a single word
Kitted out in jeans and an unironed shirt, there was an easy appeal to Gordon Lightfoot from the get-go. He truly seemed to be an everyman making music for everyone.
With kind eyes and a heart of gold, the Canadian singer turned away from the jazz he had been learning ever since he relocated to Los Angeles in 1958 to focus on songs that cut to the heart of things. He began releasing folk music in 1966, with his debut album Lightfoot!, but despite Bob Dylan saying, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like,” these early releases failed to land with the public in any large way.
Almost in parody of the hard luck genre that he now chose to peddle, it wasn’t until he endured a divorce that his music really started to connect. With five albums already under his belt, he headed into the 1970s with the emotional Sit Down Young Stranger with plenty to get off his chest.
It would go on to be Lightfoot’s biggest record, with much of the heavy lifting being done by the million-selling single, ‘If You Could Read My Mind’. This stirring song would be remembered as his masterpiece, and it all came to him while he was sitting in a vacant family home in Toronto, boxes packed and memories creaking.
In a very literal sense, the house was haunted by the happy years he had spent there. These memories clung in the nooks and crannies of the bare abode like spiderwebs and sprang out from pencil marks on doorframes and nail holes where pictures once hung like ghouls. It all reminded Lightfoot of a ghost movie.
He listlessly stood amongst it all. Suddenly, rather than a spectre from the past leaping out from some stripped space, a song cosied up to the singer’s crooked disposition. ‘A lover’s parting playing out like a ghost film, with curious subtonic chords, and a poignantly wistful proclivity’, now there was a novel way to write a break-up song, he thought.
The only issue when it came to bringing this vision to fruition was that Lightfoot was still deeply entrenched in the divorce proceedings. He might have been in a misty-eyed mood when he was standing there in an empty home, and lines like “I don’t know where we went wrong, but the feeling’s gone, and I just can’t get it back,” were scribbling their way into his psyche, however, soon enough, inevitable bitterness would salt the wound, and that bitterness belonged to a different song.
As Lightfoot explained, “Some events and traumas that have to get handled, one way or another, go into the tunes. And it’s easier and cheaper than going to a shrink.”
But feelings can be myriad and doggedly tumultuous; the beauty of the premise of ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ is how maturely and conceptually it looked at the loss of love. Bitterness is a much more visceral element of that spectrum, and it took Gordon’s young daughter, Ingrid, to show him that.
“There’s a line in the song that goes 3/4, ‘If you read between the lines, you’ll know that I’m just trying to understand the feeling that you lack.’ My daughter, who was just a girl at the time,” Lightfoot recalled, “heard the song and asked me, ‘Don’t you lack any feelings, daddy?’” It was a wise question, and her father was stumped.
“She got me to change the line to ‘the feelings that we lack’. She said I was putting the whole onus of the divorce on her mother,” Lightfoot explained. Given that she was only five or six at the time, there’s no doubting that she’s the daughter of a folk singer. But her instinct wasn’t just a sentimental one; it was right for the song, too.
Lightfoot has often expressed that the difficulty with autobiographical songs is finding enough distance from them to make clear edits. The nature of personal tracks often directly opposes his opinion that in a folk song, every word is vital. If feelings are flooding forth, such control can be tricky.
So, while it might seem dramatic on the surface to suggest that one word was enough to transform his song, the folk singer behind it figured that his daughter’s heartfelt little edit transfigured ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ immeasurably. The simple tweak turned the song from one where ghostly distance and resignation clumsily coexisted with the odd barbed comment, to a becalmed and filmic examination of the end of an affair from afar.
It’s not without irony that the song he had been looking for arrived when he was in pain, drinking “quite a bit”, and feeling the tugs of his personal life on his professional work. But from this sore situation, his career flourished. It’s not that his previous efforts, written in happier times, hadn’t been good – as Dylan decreed, Lightfoot’s back catalogue is immaculate from front to back – but this track tenderly grasped the thistle of folk with both hands. And its rapid success steered him clear from calling it a day.
As Leonard Cohen sang, “Well, never mind, we are ugly but we have the music.” Seen through the lens of folk as opposed to airbrushed pop, that line can be taken to mean that hard luck comes with its own melancholic comfort. ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ captures that sentiment. It is a song that does perfectly what folk was invented to do and confronts sadness with such poetry that you’re almost glad life is tragic after all.
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