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Columbus Dispatch review

CONCERT REVIEW | GORDON LIGHTFOOT
Singer's delivery adds to poignancy
Friday, April 4, 2008 1:13 AM
By CURTIS SCHIEBER

FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Many of Gordon Lightfoot's songs are about memory and time. As their singer and narrator, his relationship with their stories is key.

It is a tie that served him well last night, as the 69-year-old delivered a poignant, reserved and satisfying two hours of music in the Palace Theatre.

He took the stage gaunt but garrulous, aged yet eager, the survivor of a 2001 illness that left him in a coma for weeks. His voice threatened to give out before the end of every song, especially in the upper register, where it sometimes cracked. Still, he was as persistent at the end of the second set as in the first song.

The formerly rich resonance in the bottom was all but gone, but the lifelong habit of top-loading every phrase with emphasis has paid off in the autumn of his career, when it is truly difficult for him to sustain the volume throughout. His attack sounds nearly as natural today as it did 40 years ago.

Lightfoot's diminished sound lent a bittersweet tone to songs such as A Painter Passing Through and lines such as "I was in my prime, once along the way." It lent added weight to the wizened advice in others such as 14 Karat Gold.

His terrific band — longtime guitarist Terry Clemments, keyboardist Mike Heffernan, bassist Rick Haynes and drummer Barry Keane — remained tastefully in the background, stepping out only for the guitarist's concise solos.

Lightfoot's music blurred the line between the folk boom of the early 1960s and the singer-songwriter style of the 1970s, freely ranging between the iconic and historical bent of the former and the personal narrative of the latter. The memory-laden program and its delivery last night added a dimension.

Clearly, songs such as The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald, whose story remains engaging, share an allegiance to the folk tradition, while If You Could Read My Mind last night restated Lightfoot's part in the singer-songwriter era.

But many more — such as Rainy Day People, Carefree Highway and Alberta Bound — that last night took on added perspective, given the singer's advancing age and the experiences that must have inspired those songs receding deeper into memory.

Lightfoot rarely allowed the performance to settle into mere nostalgia. He suggested at turns that the next song might be familiar. But when he performed his "favorite" Dylan song, it was the late-period Ring Them Bells; when he sang Baby Step Back, he seemed to be searching for the thread that makes the song timeless.