Grateful Blog: Day 26: I was driving home from tonight’s gig and on the stereo came that great opening line “I can see her lying back in that satin dress, in a room where you do what you don’t confess…” Damn. It’s one of those songs from my childhood that just takes me back in time. I first heard Gordon Lightfoot 40 years ago when I was probably 4 years old, when ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ was his big song. I don’t know why, but every single time it came on my Mom’s old smoke tinged beige AM radio, I felt compelled to run to it and turn it up until that little 4 inch speaker started distorting out. There was something mysterious about that song and that lyric “and I will never be set free as long as I’m a ghost that you can’t see”, accompanied by that haunting melody. All these years later it still gets to me. I still don’t know what it is about that song, or even what it’s supposed to mean. It doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered. All that mattered was that song was the precise moment I can pinpoint that I fell in love with music, with songwriters and storytellers, with Gordon Lightfoot, ghosts and castles, movie stars and paperback novels. Some 25 years later, I went on a blind date with a woman and I had one of those scratch old Lightfoot cassettes in my ‘77 Buick and lo and behold she knew the words to damn near every song. Yeah, that’s right, I married her. So today, all these years later, while he’s still out there (13 shows in the last 13 nights!), I just wanted to say how Grateful I am for Gordon Lightfoot, for “If You Could Read My Mind’, for ‘Sundown’ and that girl “Lying back in that satin dress”. Thanks Gord. Safe Travels…
