Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Song for a Winter's Night
It's time to change over from the depressing subject I was on (Return of the Dark Ages) to one that is one order less magnitude, though still depressing (Return of Winter). I wanted to lead into Gordon Lightfoot's "Song for a Winter's Night" because I think he is one of the greatest English Canadian singer/songwriters. But Youtube has pulled all videos with his original songs on them. So I started hunting around for a cover version. Sarah McLachlan did one, and it's good, but I don't actually like it that much.
Several others were not too bad, but I just didn't feel the same as I did about Gordon's version. Maybe it's really hard to do a copy of Gordon Lightfoot, possibly because of the tricky guitar picking. But most of the covers that I listened to tried to do it like Gord, and they fell a bit flat.
Then I found Lori Cullen-Song For A Winter's Night-Hugh's Room-Lightfoot tribute show- Jan.18,2009. The sound quality breaks up from time to time, but that's OK by me because I grew listening to pop music on a little tube radio trying to pick up A.M. music from a thousand miles away. And this arrangement was different enough that I didn't miss Gord's voice and the guitar in the background. But it still captured what I liked about the original.
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Quite a shift in topic for this blog!
ReplyDeleteActually, this struck a deep resonant chord. I would regularly play Song for a Winter's Night as a lullaby for my kids when they were young.
Lightfoot, of course, is a Canadian icon, and it's impressive that he's still performing after all these years.
Although I've caught him in concert at the Centre in the Square in Kitchener, I miss the intimacy of his coffee house performances during my high school years ... memories to be treasured.