Inside a couple of minute of the beginning of “Wherefore & Why,” the opening monitor on Gordon Lightfoot’s Did She Point out My Identify?, you knew one thing was somewhat totally different. This third album, launched in April 1968, featured the fast-rising Canadian troubadour’s first use of strings, to elegant impact. However the essence was the identical: Lightfoot, 29 on the time of the LP’s launch, appeared to have an inexhaustible provide of top-drawer compositions to name upon. By the point it emerged, he had already written greater than 200 songs.
The brand new batch was organized by John Simon, who took over as Lightfoot’s producer, for this album solely, at a time when he was changing into one in every of America’s hottest studio properties. He had simply overseen the Songs of Leonard Cohen album, launched a number of weeks earlier, and as 1968 went on, Simon would additionally produce the equally hallowed Music From Massive Pink by The Band, Blood, Sweat & Tears‘ Child Is Father To The Man, and Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Low-cost Thrills.
Lightfoot’s new set contained among the most memorable songs of his early years, together with the extreme “Black Day In July,” written concerning the Detroit riots (“pulsating rhythm item with compelling lyric content,” stated Billboard) and the attractive, heartbreaking “The Last Time I Saw Her,” which might entice a hit nation cowl by Glen Campbell. Its phrases eloquently described the top of an affair: “The last time I saw her face/Her eyes were bathed in starlight/And her hair hung long/The last time she spoke to me/Her lips were like the scented flowers/Inside a rain-drenched forest.”
“It’s about the breakup of a marriage,” wrote Lightfoot within the liner notes to 1999’s Songbook. “In a way, you’re predicting what’s going to take place, and then it happens. In some sense you play the scene out in your mind, and after the fact, it hits you how close you were to the mark. It makes it a little tough to perform sometimes, but not tough enough to keep a great song down. In a way, it covers the same ground as ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ did years later.”
The album additionally featured the whimsical “May I,” the much-played “Pussywillows, Cat-Tails,” the unusually brassy “I Want To Hear It From You,” and the extra folk-based title monitor, of which Lightfoot stated: “It goes back to your high school sweetheart. You know you’re never going to date her again, but you meet up with a friend from the home town and you ask after her, and about all the other things you’ve missed since you moved away. You want to reconnect with your roots.”
Like its predecessor The Approach I Really feel, launched 12 months earlier, the brand new LP featured lead acoustic guitar by Pink Shea and bass by John Stockfish. Becoming a member of the staff have been widely-traveled drummer Herbie Lovelle and one other massively in-demand studio man, lead guitarist Hugh McCracken.
Lightfoot’s achievements in his house nation have been acknowledged on the MIDEM music business honest in Cannes. He was given the MIDEM Worldwide Trophy Award as “bestselling Canadian male singer” within the yr between July 1966 and June 1967. Did She Point out My Identify? achieved a Canadian chart place, at No.21, and his reside engagements included folks festivals in San Diego and San Francisco – the latter his West Coast debut – and a residency on the Troubadour in Los Angeles in April.
In March, he was additionally the topic of a Canadian Broadcasting Firm (CBC) Present of the Week TV particular known as Wherefore & Why, after the LP’s opening tune, during which he featured with Toronto scenester “Rompin’” Ronnie Hawkins and folks singer Bonnie Dobson, all signing Gordon’s songs. Hawkins had not too long ago launched a single of his countryman’s “Home From The Forest,” a monitor from The Approach I Really feel.
Covers of Lightfoot’s increasing catalog have been coming from all angles: his good friend George Hamilton IV recorded one other monitor from that set, “Song For A Winter’s Night,” whereas twentieth Century Fox signings the Raftsmen reduce “Hands I Love,” as had Harry Belafonte a number of months earlier. The singer-songwriter’s success was spreading to the large display, too: he wrote and sang the theme tune for the 1968 film Fade In, starring Burt Reynolds.
Canadian commerce journal RPM was sounding justifiably pleased with the artist’s ever higher profile in a January 1968 report, simply earlier than he gained High Male Vocalist within the publication’s annual music ballot. “The Lightfoot explosion is just about the most exciting thing that has happened to the Canadian music scene,” they wrote. “He has an over-abundance of talent as a composer and artist and the world is just beginning to realise it.”
Hearken to Did She Point out My Identify? on Apple Music and Spotify.
