This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
One of my favourite SCTV sketches was a parody of those TV-advertised greatest-hits albums. The title? Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written.
It was a perfect parody of every Boxcar Willie and Slim Whitman TV commercial. As pictures of Gordo flashed in front of red and blue lights, a list of song titles — including White Rabbit, Old MacDonald and The Theme From Mannix — scrolled up the screen. Meanwhile, someone (Rick Moranis, perhaps?) offered a spot-on impersonation, crooning Fugue for Tinhorns, I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am and other obscurities in a sleepy baritone while an overcaffeinated announcer played by Dave Thomas yelped, “You get Midnight In Moscow, Bits And Pieces and Happy Birthday!”
For some inexplicable reason, that ad for the “remarkable 379-album set” popped into my head when Songbook — the four-CD, five-hour, 88-track retrospective box spanning Lightfoot’s career — landed with a weighty thud upon my desk. Thankfully, a quick perusal of the track list reassured me I wouldn’t be sitting through Lightfoot’s version of The Bird Dance or Take Me Out To The Ball Game. Still, Songbook could easily be sold with the same type of TV pitch. After all, you get: For Lovin’ Me, Bitter Green, Alberta Bound, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, If You Could Read My Mind, Sundown, Carefree Highway, Don Quixote, The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, Rainy Day People, Baby Step Back and many, many more — including 16 unreleased tracks, an extensive hardcover biography, rare photos, cover pics from all 19 of his albums and track-by-track notes from Lightfoot himself.
And that’s not all. Some of Lightfoot’s tunes even feature one of those TV artists: Floyd Cramer, the pianist “who sold more albums than The Beatles and Elvis combined,” as his TV ads once claimed. His glissando fingers glide oh-so-smoothly behind Lightfoot on the young troubadour’s Charlie Rich-style first single, (Remember Me) I’m The One, recorded in Nashville in 1962. Luckily for both Lightfoot and the music world, his bid for mainstream country stardom went nowhere. Within three years — and three tracks on Disc 1 — he was already finding his feet in the burgeoning Toronto folk scene, singing in his sublime, cough-syrup sigh and writing numbers like For Lovin’ Me. From there, it was a short step to his status as master Canadian songsmith, thanks to the aforelisted classics, which he issued practically back-to-back as consistently and naturally as breathing.
Sure, Songbook, like most box sets, can be too extensive for its own good — some of Lightfoot’s overproduced, Moog-laced ’80s tunes seem substandard next to the earlier work — but you can’t say he’s glossed over any part of his career. And unlike plenty of boxes, the newer tracks aren’t just so much wasted plastic. After abandoning songwriting for years in the late ’80s, he returned with a newfound love for the craft, with tracks such as A Painter Passing Through bringing him full circle with grace and dignity.
So even if Lightfoot hasn’t sung every song ever written, he’s written songs practically everybody has heard. You can’t top that. Though I’d still like to hear him tackle White Rabbit.
