Lightfoot once called it "the most important song I've ever written," and estimated that it was nine years in the making. By the time he released his debut album, Lightfoot!, in 1966, the record's biggest success, "Early Morning Rain," had already been a hit for Ian & Sylvia and Peter, Paul and Mary. Lightfoot began performing his own songs, and other bands began recording them. "There were so many good songs around that I kept learning them." Rain, planes and trainsīut in 1965, that all changed. "I didn't have to rely on my own material at the beginning," Lightfoot told American Songwriter in 2008. Lightfoot wrote his first song in 1955 but it would be a full decade of playing and performing before he shifted to sets comprising mostly his own tunes. This year also marks the 65th anniversary of Lightfoot's foray from Orillia, Ont., to Los Angeles to study music composition and the beginning of his "official" music career (even though he'd been singing and performing since his youth).
The source of the inspiration doesn't matter it's what you do with it that counts. Lightfoot may not have set out to democratize the playing field with his unpretentious approach to music, but the staying power of his songs acts as radical permission for other aspiring writers and artists. Maybe it's the general normality of it, with a touch of art." "I'm not particularly smart and I'm not particularly stupid. "I'm a fairly normal sort of person," he said in a 1975 interview.
Instead, Lightfoot's omnivorous approach to creation made him an accidental disrupter of the highbrow, a brilliant songwriter subverting the vaunted purity of divine artistic genius.
Lightfoot was not an overly precious writer, a cultured aesthete wrenching words and phrases from a head stuffed full of canonical greats.
0 kommentar(er)
