Gordon Lightfoot
Don Quixote

THE REVIEW

1971-1974, from the ever-changing and multicolored charm of "Summer Side Of Life" to the smokier, introspective, and discreet allure of "Sundown": Gordon Lightfoot opens a cycle of gradual metamorphosis in his music that passes through the two albums of 1972, "Don Quixote" and "Old Dan's Records". The first of these two is the initial step in this process: "Summer Side Of Life" is the base of the recipe, "If You Could Read My Mind" and to a lesser extent his albums of the '60s are the additional ingredients to be blended, and with raw materials of such high quality, the final result can only be positive; "Don Quixote" is a further consolidation of the Lightfoot-sound, the great ideas and inspiration are not lacking here either. Like snowflakes, these albums follow one another seemingly similar, yet never identical to themselves.

Compared to his wonderful predecessor "Summer Side Of Life", "Don Quixote" is undoubtedly more homogeneous and much more tied to purely country/folk roots, "Alberta Bound" and "Second Cup Of Coffee" offer a classic sound, pleasant and carefree: the former, more rustic and "country-like", fits into a well-established line of fun up-tempo scattered throughout the 70's albums of the Maestro, the latter hides between the lines a subtle and bitter self-irony stemming from Lightfoot's own failed marital experience, which had already inspired "If You Could Read My Mind" at the time; similar feelings surface also in one of the album's highlights, "Ordinary Man", where the simple background orchestrations and the canonical bass-acoustic guitar mix enhance the beauty of the melody and the smooth and passionate interpretation of the Maestro, in a more poignant way in the heart-wrenching orchestral ballad "Looking At The Rain" and also in the single "Beautiful", which is already a window to the artist's near future, with its soft and bluesy atmosphere foreshadowing the style of "Old Dan's Records", "Sundown" and "Cold On The Shoulder", besides being one of the signature songs of his repertoire.

One of the recurring topos of Gordon Lightfoot's songwriting is that of the sea; in its more tragic aspects ("Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle") as well as in the lighter and folkloric ones ("High And Dry"), or as simple poetry and contemplation ("Ghosts Of Cape Horn"), this theme has inspired some of the songwriter's most beautiful and evocative songs, and "Don Quixote" offers two of them; both refer to the sober simplicity of '60s acoustic Lightfoot, the sweet and dreamy ballad "Christian Island" and a deliberately sparse song with an epic and unsettling atmosphere, "Ode To Big Blue", which in its elegiac and legendary tones conceals a sharp denunciation of whale hunting. These two acoustic gems are undoubtedly among the album's highest points along with the title track "Don Quixote", which revives the orchestral and evocative stylistic features of "Minstrel Of The Dawn" by narrating a mythical and idealized figure, far from the grotesque character of Miguel de Cervantes' novel, mixing lofty images with decidedly more earthly ones: ("See the soldier with his gun who must be dead to be admired", "See the man who puts the collar on the ones who dare not tell, "See the youth in the ghetto black, condemned to life upon the street").

Like "Summer Side Of Life", "Don Quixote" also closes by going beyond the simple song form, and it does so with the powerful anti-militarist message of "Patriot's Dream", in the apparent cheerfulness and carefreeness of the opening "The patriot's dream is as old as the sky, it lives in the lust of a cold callous lie, let's drink to the men who got caught by the chill of the patriotic fever and the cold steel that kills" and in the dark and