“Damn poor”: the one song Gordon Lightfoot deeply regretted
When people are asked to name the greatest goddamn Canadian songwriters of all time, their first ports of call are likely to be Joni Mitchell or Neil Young. If you ask a Canadian, they might reveal someone else who is more revered in their homeland.
Gordon Lightfoot is, seemingly, every Canadian songwriter’s favourite songwriter, and for good reason. Having penned tracks folk hits like ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, ‘Sundown’ and ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, reaching number one in his home country on all three occasions as well as entering the top five of the Billboard charts, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate an artist like Lightfoot. In addition to this, Marty Robbins’ hit, ‘Ribbon of Darkness’ is a Lightfoot composition, if it needed to be stressed any more that he’s something of a national treasure.
When you’ve got the likes of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Robbie Robertson all singing your praises, you’ve got to be doing something right, and yet, outside of these circles, he’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as the phrase: “the greatest songwriter of all time”. This is unfortunate because he thoroughly deserves to be included in this conversation.
However, despite his immense track record and reverential fucking status among his peers, he wasn’t always his own biggest fan, and this boils down to him expressing issues with some of the lyrics that he wrote during a time when attitudes were considerably different from they are in the modern age. If Lightfoot had written some of his material in more recent times, then perhaps he’d have reconsidered releasing it with the misogynistic undertones that were present.
When asked in a 2016 interview with Vanity Fair about the words in ‘For Lovin’ Me’, a track from his 1966 debut album, Lightfoot!, he appeared to feel queasy when certain lines were read back to him. The lyrics to the second verse read: “That’s what you get for lovin’ me. I ain’t the kind to hang around, with any new love that I found, ’cause movin’ is my stock in trade, I’m movin’ on. I won’t think of you when I’m gone,” and Lightfoot himself didn’t seem to have many positives to give on these lines.
“Oh my goodness, yeah,” he began. “That’s a bad one. I was married at the time, and it was a damn poor song to write when you’re married to somebody. I learned a lesson from that, because after I sang that song for a while, I asked myself, ‘What am I saying?’ Even long after I was divorced and separated and she’d gone her way and I’d gone mine, I would sing this song and think, ‘Geez. How did she ever put up with this?’ I stopped singing it.”
While it may have been one of the most respected tracks in his repertoire at the time, Lightfoot’s decision to remove it from performances came from a place of remorse for the insinuations that come with the lyrics. Besides, he could always fill his sets with better material anyway, which he was more than aware of. “I just do the cream-of-the-crop songs in my show,” he concluded. “We just bowl them over; they love us. It just keeps getting better.”
