Gordon Lightfoot - Gordon Lightfoot - Complete Greatest Hits

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Music reviews of Gordon Lightfoot - Complete Greatest Hits

Music Review: The best One-Stop Shop available!
Rating: 5 Stars

Being an ardent admirer of Gordon Lightfoot's music for many years, I can tell you there isn't much to be frustrated about when you're a Lightfoot fan; after all, we're talking about a career that has spanned over 35 years. While countless others have come and gone, Lightfoot is still out there: performing, recording, and creating. However, there is one frustration I HAVE encountered as a Lighfoot fan, which can be summed up in the following question: "Hey, I heard a Gordon Lightfoot song the other day and really liked it. I'd like to investigate his music further--what CD do you recommend?"

With a career as long and as consistently good as Lightfoot's, this is almost an impossible question to answer. In his comments, Mr. Tierney talks about how tough it was to prune the wonderful 4-CD box set Songbook down to 88 tracks. And yet, Songbook could have been six CDs, and still some great music would have had to have been left off.

So where do you begin if you want to recommend Gordon Lightfoot albums? If you're more of a fan of folk music, then you'd want to go back to the 60s releases (a.k.a. the UA years). If your tastes run to the singer/songwriter genre that came to prominence in the 70s, then perhaps you want to listen any of Lightfoot's albums from that decade (and he did put out some great ones!). Or if you want to hear more recent work--some of which includes attempts to update his sound to reach a contemporary audience while staying true to his own musical vision--then you may want to check any of the post-70s albums, each of which is very different from the others.

Now there certainly are compilations available that cover these various aspects of Lightfoot's career. However, they tend to be concentrated in one particular era: for example, compilations of the UA material from the 60s; a mid-70s compilation entitled "Gord's Gold" (which goes through 1975 and does include a selection of his earlier work; however, these earlier works were re-recorded for this set with a more mid-70s musical feel to them); or a mid-80s CD entitled "Gord's Gold 2" (which principally consists of re-recordings with Lightfoot's current touring band, but, unfortunately, isn't very well recorded).

With Complete Greatest Hits, Rhino has put together the best "one-stop shop" you'll ever find. Here, in pristine remastered glory--and in their original versions--are some of the songs that first brought Lightfoot to prominence as a songwriter back in the mid-60s (many of his early tunes were covered by other artists and were significant hits). These early works also brought Lightfoot considerable fame in his native Canada as certain of his songs--most notably "Canadian Railroad Trilogy"--seemed to capture in music the essence of the Canadian experience.

Lightfoot is perhaps best known in the US for his releases in the 70s, and consequently, he is usually included in the musical genre commonly known as the era of the "singer/songwriter." But it's always been my opinion that this is too generalized an area to pidgeonhole him in. For a start, he's a little older than most of the artists included in the singer/songwriter genre. Thus, his songs from this era have a bit more maturity to them; they are less innocent, a little more world-weary, a little more aware, and perhaps even a little less sentimental. Some critics have accused him of being detached, but I don't agree with this. He's simply taking an adult view of the world. That being said, all the 70s hits are here, and--in common with the tracks on Songbook--you're going to hear them like you've never heard them before. The remastering is once again superb--I may be imagining things, but it seems to me that even the tracks that appear on both Complete Greatest Hits and Songbook sound even better on CGH! Think you've heard Sundown enough times in your life? Give it a listen on this CD. It is a veritable clinic on how to record acoustic guitars. If you're a guitar afficiando, you are probably well familiar with Red Shea's memorable Telecaster solo on the track--but take a listen to some of the beautiful acoustic guitar licks Terry Clements plays throughout the song. CGH captures this like nothing has before.

Lighfoot hit a period of artistic inconsistency in the 80s and 90s as he worked to update his sound to suit contemporary tastes, while still remaining true to his own musical spirit. Nevertheless, he turned out a bunch of great songs, and a good representative sample of these show up on CHG.

Thus, in conclusion, this CD has something for everyone. If you're a fan, and have all these tracks on the various albums they were originally released on, this is a great way to have them all in one place.

And if you're just discovering the music of Gordon Lightfoot, I definitely recommend you hit the "Add to Shopping Cart" button right now. Complete Greatest Hits will give you a wonderful overview of a simply remarkable career in music. There's a great essay by producer Thane Tierney, along with individual album credits: you can trace the songs you like on CGH to their source, and thus begin your exploration of Lightfoot's music in more detail. Kudos to Rhino: no one does these sorts of things better than they do.

In his comments on this site, Mr. Tierney talked about calling this compilation "Gordon Lightfoot: An Introduction," until his "inner marketing geek" told him that this title probably wouldn't work. But call it what you will: "Complete Greatest Hits" is simply the best one-CD compilation available of an artist whose music has been touching hearts and speaking to souls for decades.

Buy it! Trust me!

Description of Gordon Lightfoot - Complete Greatest Hits

Folk CDs

• Music > Styles
• Pop
• Rock