This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
We’ve all heard of life imitating art, but this is ridiculous. Not to mention a little creepy.
More than a few of the songs on Gordon Lightfoot’s melancholy 20th album Harmony are filled with images of mortality, loss and regret. Sure, that’s pretty much what you’d expect from a guy who nearly died from an abdominal aneurysm back in 2002 — except that all these songs were written and partly recorded before the Canadian folk legend’s illness. Oooo-weeee-oooo! (Cue Twilight Zone theme here.)
Whether Gordo had an inkling trouble was coming, only he can say. All I can tell you is that these 11 cuts — most built around Lightfoot’s demos and completed under his supervision from hospital — are some of his most darkly beautiful and emotionally pointed compositions in ages. His voice as weathered and inviting as an old porch, Lightfoot laments lost loves, reflects on wrong turns in life’s long journey and even salutes his home town of Orillia, quietly strumming his acoustic as his band tastefully fleshes out the sparse arrangements. And when he sings lines like, “I won’t be lookin’ up old friends ever again,” it’s with a the calm certainty of a man in harmony with his own mortality — and his art.
