In Stores Now: Gordon Lightfoot, SOLO

You know him for such iconic tunes as “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” but it’s been 14 years since famed Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot last released a studio album’s worth of new music.

Actually, scratch that. As of this morning, it’s no longer accurate.

Even as you read this sentence, you can now purchase a copy of SOLO, the first new studio LP from Gordon Lightfoot in 16 years. That’s right: not since 2004’s HARMONY has our man Gord released a new studio album.

In other words, this is a pretty big deal.

The origins of HARMONY are pretty fascinating in their own right: Lightfoot stumbled upon two CDs worth of songs that he’d recorded the better of two decades earlier, having written them just prior to suffering an almost-fatal abdominal aortic aneurysm in 2002. Refamiliarizing himself with the material, he took nothing more than himself, his guitar, and the songs into Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario and laid down an album’s worth of tunes.

If you’d ever been a fan of the esteemed Mr. Lightfoot and his music, we can only ask the same question of you that Lightfoot himself asks in the title of the closing track of SOLO: “Why Not Give It A Try?”

No, seriously. Why don’t you? It’s out there waiting for you.

SOLO
1. “Oh So Sweet”
2. “E-Motion”
3. “Better Off”
4. “Return Into Dust”
5. “Do You Walk, Do You Talk”
6. “Just a Little Bit”
7. “Easy Flo”
8. “Dreamdrift”
9. “The Laughter We Seek”
10. “Why Not Give It a Try”