Gordon Lightfoot
Summertime Dream

THE REVIEW

The circle closes here: it all began in 1966 with acoustic and unadorned folk, with a simple yet ingenious anthem from a wandering minstrel, "Early Morning Rain"; that minstrel, album after album, masterpiece after masterpiece, had continued to gradually evolve: a volcano of ideas, an extremely prolific songwriter, a genius of melody, capable of writing simple, popular songs without ever slipping into banality, an eclectic lyricist, attentive to both personal and more social and committed themes. Gordon Lightfoot from Orilia, a town in Ontario not far from Toronto, lived ten years as an authentic legend, many artists much more known and celebrated than him would not be able to achieve anything remotely similar even in a hundred years of career. Sooner or later this formidable cycle had to end, and by 1976, Gordon Lightfoot was almost ready to return to earth, but not before delivering the final blow, the fitting conclusion to a fantastic and unrepeatable story: "Summertime Dream."

After the great commercial success achieved with "Sundown" in 1974, the next step for the Canadian singer-songwriter was "Cold On The Shoulder," a calm and introspective album, consisting mainly of ballads with an at times bucolic atmosphere, almost representing a final step in the journey that began in 1972 with "Old Dan's Records" and continued with "Sundown." "Summertime Dream" is therefore an album marked by discontinuity with its immediate predecessors: eclecticism returns, vitality returns, the colors of that great masterpiece that was "Summer Side Of Life" from 1971 return, with one important difference: "Summertime Dream" is essentially a singer-songwriter folk rock album, that emphasizes the electric component more decisively than its predecessors. This shift is noticeable right from the single "Race Among The Ruins," an extremely radio-friendly and catchy track, punctuated by a rhythm curiously identical to that of Queen's contemporary "We Will Rock You," where acoustic and electric guitars go hand in hand, intertwining to create a bright and immediately recognizable sound texture, a trademark also found in the more composed and vaguely melancholic "Never Too Close" and in "I'd Do It Again," which is pure and simple folk-rock, driving and paced, less creative than the rest of the album but very enjoyable and well-played, with a brief but incisive steel guitar solo. This characteristic style also adapts to slower episodes like the bleak "Protocol," very intense and dramatic, where Lightfoot delivers one of his career's best texts of bitter reflection, almost resigned before the barbarity of the war that repeats itself unchanged throughout human history, and the concluding, very refined "Too Many Clues In This Room," which with its fascinating bluesy sound, highlights the songwriter's elegant vocals and the enigmatic nature of an allegorical, not easily interpreted text, directly recalling the atmospheres of "Sundown," reinterpreted in a more electric key.

As in all Gordon Lightfoot albums, in "Summertime Dream" there’s also room for lighter and more carefree episodes, primarily the delightful title track, cheerful and breezy, an almost nursery rhyme as simple as it is successful and effective, a bit like "Go My Way" from "Summer Side Of Life" was, then "I'm Not Supposed To Care," the album's only true ballad, well-interpreted and enhanced by languid guitar phrases, and the evocative "The House You Live In" and "Spanish Moss," characterized by very relaxing and meditative semi-acoustic sounds, especially the latter, a true jewel of bucolic and meditative poetry.

All this would be enough to make "Summertime Dream" one of Gordon Lightfoot's best albums for immediacy, creativity, and inspiration, but there's an added value, there's a song that alone would deserve a separate review: just as "Early Morning Rain" was the symbol of the essential Gordon Lightfoot of the '60s, a simple country songwriter, so this song is the highest point reached by the mature and eclectic songwriter of the following decade: "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald." The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an impressive cargo ship employed in the transport of iron ore, which sank in the waters of Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, in the grip of a violent storm, with no survivors among the twenty-nine crew members. This theme is not new for Lightfoot, who already in 1969 wrote "Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle," a vivid and haunting ballad about the tragic end of an aging steamship sunk following a fire, but "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" is much more: a metallic, screeching guitar riff that repeats endlessly, drums and bass enter at a later stage, marking a hypnotic and immutable rhythm, the singing is solemn, almost declamatory, from a precise and omniscient narrator, apparently detached but with a higher objective than narrating a news event: the atmosphere of this song is epic, tense, solemn, gray and stormy like the sky above Lake Superior on that sad day, and its circular and unchanging structure implies the presence of an inexorable fate, of a superior power of Nature capable of overcoming the man who ventures to challenge it, even capable of sinking into the lake's waters a fourteen-thousand-tonne colossus, the pride of the naval engineering of the time.

"The church bell chimed ‘til it rang twenty-nine times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee, Superior they said never gives up her dead when the gales of November came early."