Gordon Lightfoot

Summertime Dream

Sounds better than ever

Review Score:

(8/10)
This album is vintage Lightfoot, and the bard's lyrics, always honest and searching (and sometimes inscrutable and open to multiple interpretations) shine here. This is the album on which The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald appeared, and one sees now how the world of popular music has changed - there is no way a literate, nearly six-minute song about comparatively minor tragedy in the maritime history could appear at the top of the charts again. The power of this tale lies in the slow build up to the wreck and the repetitive musical phrasing, like the constant battering of the good ship by the gale of November 1975, and Lightfoot's easy description of the Great Lakes geography. Other great tunes include the wistful Protocol (about the disappearance of personal heroism and sacrifice and its replacement by an anonymous technological warrior-elite), the advice-laden The House that You Live In, and the Arcadian ditty Summertime Dream. You could take every song here and strip away the music, and then read the lyrics as a poem - they are great. In fact, you can do that with most of Lightfoot's songs. One wonders: where did Gord get his lyrics? He covers so much in his song - history, love, death, ruin, redemption, etc. As a child, did he read a lot? He seems unnaturally wise. I bought this album when it came out in the 1970s, listened to it intensely on a record player, and then it, along with so many other records, were sold when my folks sold their home in the 1990s. I recently bought it as a CD and it sounds even better than ever; as one gets older, Gord's lyrics get richer. Unfortunately, as I am writing this, the bard himself is in bad health, though recovering, prompting one to wonder, as did he in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

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