I spent the first half of my life in Orillia Ontario. Growing up I didn't have many hometown heroes; people who made it out of this sleepy boring city to make something of themselves. The city would desperately harp on about Stephen Leacock, a man who happened to have a cottage there, and wrote an incredibly mean spirited book about Orillia. The only other name mentioned was Gordon Lightfoot. There was never a time in my life where his music wasn't around, but when I was young, to me his music was the corny, AM radio stuff I'd hear at the local breakfast restaurants. (Though, quietly to myself, "If I could read your Mind" always moved me, and "Sundown" was always badass).
Orillia didn't have a music scene to speak of back then. Mariposa Folk Festival was long gone (wouldn't come back until 2000, a year after I left for Toronto), and if you wanted a gig you had to rent out the Oddfellows hall, or maybe play a high school event. Some of my first gigs were in surrounding areas, Stroud, Barrie, Newmarket. Kids had nowhere close by to play and nowhere to see live music. Thankfully, that seems to have changed a bit. I hope it has.
So i got out. I took the first chance I could to move to a city that had an abundance of music, and I soaked it up. The funny thing is, as time progressed, I would begin hear Gord's tunes differently. I didn't understand his songs before, because I'd never lived. The more I lived, the more his songs made sense to me. The more I travelled, loved, felt, played, interacted with other people... the closer I felt to his songs.
I owe a great deal of my guitar style, and my 2014 album "William" to Gord's early albums "Lightfoot!" and "The Way I Feel". Without his 80's albums "Salute" and "Shadows", my 2017 album "Topaz" would be entirely different, or maybe wouldn't exist at all.
A few years back I got a chance to interview him for a friends radio show. I showed up early, and because of that I got a whole 10 minutes to talk with him. I recorded our conversation, but I haven't listened to it since, and honestly I was never going to give that interview to anyone. It was too precious. To me it was an excuse to talk to a hero, a fellow Orillian who "got out", if just for a few minutes, and I will always cherish that brief interaction.
See you at Mariposa this year. Let's sing some Lightfoot songs.
