GRANTED IT'S NO WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD ...


Gordon Lightfood is Canadian.  Perhaps this explains the forty-verse epochal Edmund Fitzgerald, which Tony and I discovered just a few years back (though we'd each heard it approximately seventeen and a half million times since the seventies) has NO CHORUS.  It's an unrelieved dirge.

But we're not talking about that particular dirge.  Let's talk about If You Could Read My Mind for a moment.

There are songs on the list there that are far less well-crafted.  This was, in fact, one of the better songs I remember from that era.  It was simple, it didn't say anything it didn't need to say, and doG knows Lightfoot is anything but melodramatic.   His delivery is so laconic, it could be used in prison cubes, along with the dusty rose paint job, to soothe prisoners.

Unless they played it end to end a hundred times every single day.  Then, it would start to be sadistic.  The convicts would start fantasizing about things that they thought the song was actually about, since the lyrics are beautifully simple and spare.   They might start unconsciously banging their heads on the tube-steel bed frames, scratching at the concrete walls until their fingers were worn down to the bone, and perhaps even attempting to chew their own legs off, like a wolf caught in a snap traip.

Which is to say, I heard it entirely too many times to like it until fifteen years later.

Have we heard this one before?