Gordon Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot’s best songs have never been overly complicated things. Save for some light backing flourishes, classics such as “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” and “If You Could Read My Mind” are little more than his poetry and philosophical wanderings on full display. With Solo, a suite of stripped-back vocal-and-acoustic-guitar songs, there’s even less for the legendary Canadian singer-songwriter to hide behind. While it’s his first newly heard music since 2004’s Harmony, the writing actually predates that album. Lightfoot happened upon a cache of material he’d first recorded in 2001 and 2002, just prior to suffering an aortic aneurism, while cleaning his Toronto home. He took the demos and attempted to arrange them for his band, but ultimately decided to redo them with almost no additional production. The result has a particularly live-sounding immediacy and intimacy, which suits the subject matter, whether it’s the prescient “E-Motion” (which explores oversharing in the internet age), the wistful opener “Oh So Sweet,” or the reflective “Return Into Dust.” At age 81 and 21 albums in, though, Lightfoot is most revealing on the closer, “Why Not Give It a Try,” a track about keeping life fresh and challenging, and never slowing down.

Following the success of Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot continued his success by releasing a greatest-hits compilation. A double album (now a single CD), it contained the most popular songs from his Warner Bros. years on disc two, and he re-recorded many of his early songs for side one of record one. Although not as good, perhaps, as the originals, this did bring them up to date with his current sound style. Just about all the favorites are here (except "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which hadn't been recorded yet when this set was put together and appears on Lightfoot's second volume of Gord's Gold), making this a good general overview of a strong talent. When Warner transferred the double LP to CD, "Affair on 8th Avenue" was dropped from the program to make the set fit on a single disc. Randy Newman arranged the orchestration on "Minstrel of the Dawn," by the way.