This was a wonderfully evocative tale of love gone wrong inspired, as great songs often are, by some of the songwriter’s own dark times.
IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND MOVIE
If you could read my mind, love What a tale my thoughts could tell Just like an old-time movie About a ghost from a wishing well In a castle dark or a fortress strong With chains upon my feet You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I’m a ghost that you can see It was a complete story, a novel almost, in the length of a pop song…a fairly long pop song, admittedly, but still… The song was everything I’d hoped it would be.Īlthough I adored the melody, I also loved the lyrics I’d read while following along with the sheet music. So it wasn’t until much later that I heard Gordon Lightfoot singing “If I Could Read Your Mind” on the radio for the first time. Kids like me had BBC Radio One, our parents had BBC Radio Two and, if you were lucky, a decent local commercial station like Capital Radio, or in my case Radio Clyde. “If I Could Read Your Mind” had been released back in 1970, nearly a decade before I’d first heard “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio.Īnd as we didn’t have “oldies radio” back then, I didn’t stand a chance of picking up Gordon Lightfoot’s performance. Up to this point, I hadn’t even heard “If I Could Read Your Mind” on the radio…pretty much the only way we heard music in the pre-internet days without actually buying a physical piece of vinyl. Even allowing for amateurish attempts to make the piano sound halfway decent, it was a very moving piece of music.Īnd as I followed along with the sheet music, I couldn’t help but read the words of the verses that appeared under each note I played. I think the publishers were probably stretching both the terms “popular” and “of the time” a little, but there were a number of great songs in there, one of which happened to be another Gordon Lightfoot song, “If I Could Read Your Mind”. Writing these words now, I know this sounds desperately quaint…like the sort of thing that happened in an episode of Downton Abbey…but this really was what you did just a couple of decades ago before the internet was invented. Gordon Lightfoot had written it just a short time previously about a 1975 accident which resulted in the sinking of a bulk carrier in Lake Superior with the loss of all 29 hands.īut it was an intriguing song which led me to explore his work a little more.īy chance I was learning the piano at the same time and had bought a large-format book containing the sheet music for some of the popular songs of the time. I later discovered that “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” wasn’t an old-time folk song at all. So what sounded like an old-time folk song stood out. There was a lot of hard-edged punk around at the time, jostling for chart success with the stark, emotionless soundscapes of early electronic music. Once day in the 1970s, Paul Gambuccini played Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”. Long before Spotify and other streaming services made the charts around the world remarkably similar, songs you’d never heard before would pop up on his show. Paul Gambuccini used to present a weekly US chart show on BBC Radio One back in the 1970s and 80s with all the top tunes from the Billboard Hot 100. I discovered Gordon Lightfoot a little late. Like James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Carole King’s Tapestry and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, If You Could Read My Mind belongs to and transcends its time and place to become an ageless classic.“If You Could Read My Mind” - Gordon Lightfoot
Much of the album is recorded as a simple trio, augmented in strategic spots by Ry Cooder on mandolin, John Sebastian on autoharp and Van Dyke Parks on harmonium.
The country flow of “Saturday Clothes” and the simple elliptical folk sway of “Cobwebs & Dust” are easily overlooked, sandwiched in between the better-known works. “Minstrel of the Dawn,” with a string arrangement from Randy Newman, is an elegant and stately classic.
Lightfoot takes on Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” with notably less histrionics than Janis Joplin. Lightfoot’s presence as a Canadian folk-singing songwriter was well known in musical circles, but this album began the subtle transition into one of the biggest stars of the ‘70s soft-rock era. Initially released as Sit Down Young Stranger, this album was re-titled when “If You Could Read My Mind” became a sizable radio hit.
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