(my signed Lightfoot photo from his mid-’60s beginnings)
Hands-down, his best is “If You Could Read My Mind” with its many conflicts between reality/truth and romance/illusion. It was his first top ten hit and I liked its lyrics enough to use in one of my first high-school student anthologies. “But for now, love, let’s be real.” An amazing narrative with some of his best imagery and most fearless self-assessment. Maybe the most honest love song ever written.
His earliest memorable love-song with equally strong imagery, this time of a man alone in his winter room, writing to his love is “Song for a Winter’s Night”. Classic, classic. The feeling of deep winter, solitude, and loneliness, complete with sleigh bells sound effects. This may be the best winter love song of all time. “The lamp is burning low upon my tabletop/My glass is almost empty–“
His most ‘naked’, ‘open’ love song, though, is “Shadows”, from later in his career, about a man looking back on a former love.
Won’t you reach out, love, and touch me?
Let me hold you for awhile
I been all around the world
Oh, how I long to see you smile
There’s a shadow on the moon
And the waters here below
Do not shine the way they should
And I love you just in case you didn’t know
Let it go…
Let it happen like it happened once before
It’s a wicked wind and it chills me to the bone
And if you do not believe me
Come and gaze upon the shadow at your door
Won’t you lie down by me, baby?
Run your fingers through my hands
I been all around the town
And still I do not understand
Is it me or is it you?
Or the shadow of a dream?
Is it wrong to be in love?
Could it be the finest love I’ve ever seen?
Set it free…
Let it happen like it happened once before
It’s a wicked wind and it chills me to the bone
And if you do not believe me
Come and gaze upon the shadow at your door
A very powerful disclosure of personal desire and candid longing as no other songwriter has ever equalled. There is something extremely poignant about many of the phases and lines Lightfoot uses:
“Won’t you reach out, love, and touch me?”
“And I love you just in case you didn’t know”
“It’s a wicked wind and it chills me to the bone”
“Is it wrong to be in love”
“Come and gaze upon the shadow at your door”
I used to love the first song; it is still very memorable and powerful. The second remains an old favorite from a time in the ’60s when I myself was still a folksinger playing stages and coffeehouses back in Winnipeg. But the third will always remain the last word on love as far as I’m concerned, and I suspect, Lightfoot, too.