By John Threlfall

If Canadian music had a face, it would surely look like Gordon Lightfoot.

Flick on the radio any time during the last 60 years and you’d hear his iconic voice soothing the airwaves. Rewind to 1985’s African-famine superstar video Tears Are Not Enough and he’s the first singer on camera. He performed at both Canada’s 100th and 150th anniversaries, for two different Prime Ministers named Trudeau; he was the featured singer at the opening ceremonies of Calgary’s 1988 Winter Olympics, the Grey Cup’s 100th anniversary in 2012 and he performed at Toronto’s venerable Massey Hall over 170 times. His face is on a stamp, his likeness became a lifesize statue, his career spawned a tribute album, a biography and a documentary, and he has been honoured with practically every award Canada could think up.

For me, Lightfoot has always been there: his first album was released in 1966, when I was just two, and one of his final tour dates was in Nanaimo, just six months before his death in 2023. That means I’m old enough (or young enough) to have always lived in a world where rainy day people could watch the sundown from the summer side of life or hear the early morning rain falling on the carefree highway during a black day in July.

Flip through my record collection and you’ll find him tucked between Led Zeppelin and Loggins & Messina on a well-worn copy of Fantastic Gordon Lightfoot, the 1974 K-Tel album celebrating his “24 big hits on 2 vinyl records!” . . . yet that was still early enough in his career that his most recognizable songs (“Sundown”, “Carefree Highway”, “Rainy Day People”, “Edmund Fitzgerald”) had yet to be released. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find his influence throughout my music library: Tom Cochrane, Blue Rodeo, Ron Sexsmith, Cowboy Junkies, David Francey, William Prince, Stephen Fearing, Kathleen Edwards, Aysanabee . . . his inspiration continues to fill the grooves of Canadian singer-songwriters to this day.

Lightfoot’s tunes are an ideal choice for the perennially popular genre of jukebox musicals. With so many touring shows based on the music of so many artists, what’s really surprising is that the Belfry is the first to create something like If You Could Read My Mind. But, as with their 2016 hit, I Think I’m Fallin’: The Songs of Joni Mitchell, cocreators Michael Shamata and Tobin Stokes have shown they’ve got what it takes to transform a solid-gold discography into a much-loved production.

“Approaching a singer-songwriter’s work this way is such a privilege,” says composer Stokes. “We have time to test each song’s resilience – the lyrics, melody, chord progression . . . while it’s a concert, it somehow magically blooms into theatre.”

As with us all, Lightfoot’s legacy is part of the personal soundtracks for both of the show’s creators. Director Shamata associates one particular song with his early days in the industry: “It was ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ but sung by Barbra Streisand on her Stoney End album . . . it was probably when I was working at the Shaw Festival as a stage manager back in the ’70s.” For his part, Stokes remembers hearing that iconic baritone and 12-string guitar on the living room hi-fi while growing up in Powell River. “The sound of Lightfoot’s voice, his particular turns of phrase . . . they mingle with certain childhood memories, as good songs often do.”

When it comes to crafting a show, however, it’s no mean feat to crunch 20 albums down to just 25 songs suitable for a cast of five. Shamata says they’ve been discussing song selection since they first came up with the idea: he describes it as “a very collaborative process, which continues once we’re in the room with the actor-singers.” For Stokes, it’s almost intuitive: “As we get busy collaborating, the songs start telling us if we’re on the right track.”

John Threlfall is a longtime local writer and arts advocate. Photo by Blake Handley.