The singer that Bob Dylan and Neil Young both agree wrote the best songs
The entire history of Bob Dylan and Neil Young together has always been a bit of a touchy subject.
As much as Dylan was one-of-a-kind and a massive inspiration to Young, there were always a few pieces of songs like ‘Heart of Gold’ that never sat well with Dylan because they sounded too much like him. It may have been a coincidence, but both of them did have the same musical inspirations that made them look at their own masterpieces in a much different light.
After all, it’s not like Dylan needed to be a musical savant to be able to play any of his songs. A lot of those early recordings could be done with a couple of chords and maybe one or two fingerpicking patterns, but as long as it had a great melody behind it or told a compelling story, who the hell cared about what the chords were? It was about how the song made you feel, and you can also feel that kind of emotional weight whenever Young took a solo or broke out the acoustics.
He was always meant to follow his own muse, and while that led to more than a few chaotic albums in his catalogue, no one ever doubted that he was doing whatever he wanted to do. An album like Tonight’s the Night may have had some of the most beautiful songs that Young ever made, but even if it had a few mixing differences from his classic records, it was a better way to paint the picture of Young’s broken heart.
That was how folk songwriting was supposed to work, but even when Dylan looked past his original heroes like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, someone like Gordon Lightfoot was everything that he wanted to hear in a songwriter. Every single lyric in his songs was a piece of poetry, and after years of listening to him, Dylan said that the late songwriting legend never made a bad tune.
While Dylan has been known to ramble more than a few times in his songs, he said that Lightfoot could have rambled for as long as he wanted and he would still be entertained, saying, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever… Lightfoot became a mentor for a long time. I think he probably still is.”
And for Young, he has more of a firsthand experience when listening to Lightfoot’s music. Both of them had come from Canada, and while he wasn’t in Young’s backyard by any means, there was a lot more going on with him than songs like ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’. This was songwriting genius, and after he passed away, Young had no problem calling him one of the best songwriters that he had ever heard.
Much like Dylan, Young was convinced that Lightfoot’s work would be playing for years to come, saying, “Gordon was a great Canadian artist. A songwriter without parallel, His melodies and words were an inspiration to all writers who listened to his music, as they will continue to be through the ages.” Not all of his tunes were as popular in the rest of the world, but if you look at a song like ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, each line would have been enough to be a masterpiece on its own.
Lightfoot wasn’t the mentor in the literal sense, but when listening to the way that Young and Dylan approached their songs, they’re drawing from his playbook in many respects. He took the idea of folk music and put it into the pop format, and while not every song was a masterpiece, they were examples of him woodshedding until he finally found the right chords and melodies that would work.
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