By Christian Cullen
Hi there! Welcome to Retro Review. In this article, I will find albums that are celebrating anniversaries from long ago and review them as if they came out yesterday. We begin with Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sit Down Young Stranger”, which was the original name of the album before it was renamed to If You Could Read My Mind.
For those of you who are not familiar with Lightfoot, that’s ok. Here is a quick review. Lightfoot was one of the preeminent folk singers of the 1970s, especially in the Canadian Folk Rock scene. Lightfoot was active as a musician for decades, and his work is rightly regarded as massively influential. For reference, Bob Dylan called Lightfoot one of his personal favorites. Even if you do not think you’ve heard his music before, I promise you that you have, especially my friends from the Midwest. He wrote the iconic “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a song that tells the story of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter. Sadly, Lightfoot died in May of 2023, leaving behind mountains of good music for his fans to continue to enjoy. This particular album was one of his best, reaching #12 on the Billboard Charts with the titular song, “If You Could Read My Mind,” reaching #1 in Canada and #5 in the US. It was released in April 1970, making it 54 years old this month.
Now, onto the album itself. While it can be rightly considered a no-skip album, there is no better place to start than If You Could Read My Mind. Lightfoot’s acoustic guitar and deep voice help set up a sad scene of lost love. Lightfoot addresses an old lover, saying that if only they could read his mind, things would have ended better between them, saying that the heartache between them was inevitable. He sings at the end of the song, “And I’ve just got to say that I just don’t get it… I don’t know where we went wrong… But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back.” This song is further down on the tracklist, but its sense of yearning and nostalgia for love gone wrong pushed it to number one in his fans’ hearts.
Lightfoot continues his album with another love song in the heartwarming narrative of “Approaching Lavender.” Lavender is his love, and he says that once you come to love them, “Oh sweet lavender I must be with you constantly…Your presence means so much to me…Much more than life itself.” The song goes forth with Lightfoot making further reference to the mysteriousness and fascinating character of his “lavender.” The song’s faster pace and higher tone, along with a useful guitar riff as a bridge, give the album a bit of brevity, and upon a closer listen, showing the depths one can have to love someone through music.
The original titular song, “Sit Down Young Stranger,” holds its own as well. Lightfoot has a quiet voice on this one as he narrates an inner dialogue as an old man looking back on his life. This song is one of woe, as the man describes the trials, lessons, tribulations, and strife that he had experienced. Lightfoot’s titular character does not come to a good answer about his life. Instead, the song contains a deeply depressing ending full of religious influence. The character looks around and says, “John loves Mary, does anyone love me?” Since this follows a reference to Jesus and the crown of thorns, we can only assume this is the disciple John and the Virgin Mary. This is a song that on its face has an upbeat rhythm, but is instead one of the more emotionally devastating songs on the album.There are many more songs on this album to enjoy. “Baby It’s Alright” and “Saturday Clothes” give Lightfoot a chance to show off his vocal range and a bit of a faster pace. “Minstrel of the Dawn” and “Me and Bobby McGee” set a slower pace, but are just as enjoyable listens. I will not, and likely cannot, go into depth for every song. But I hope you do. The impetus for this article series was so people would go back in time and find some good music from the past. If you have some time this week, give the album a listen. You may discover a whole new genre of music to enjoy.