Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind

Approaching age eighty, Canadian music icon Gordon Lightfoot - in no particular order, singer, songwriter, guitarist chief among those musical talents - reflects on his life and career. That career is performing almost exclusively his own songs, which are primarily an unconscious reflection of his life for good or bad. In that path to a professional music career, he talks about his formal music schooling in Los Angeles, his early music start including playing the coffee houses in Toronto where he first gained some renown especially in the folk music scene, and his subsequent international success despite having what many would consider a distinctly Canadian sound and distinctly Canadian outlook and in often bucking the prevailing musical trends of the era. That success has included many musicians from a wide array of genres covering his songs, despite he not having written any specifically for them. With his personal life, he talks about his happy upbringing in Orillia, ON, and the unconditional support he received from his parents, but also the combination of the destructive personal relationships - arguably most public with Cathy Evelyn Smith best known as the person who gave John Belushi what proved to be a fatal injection of a speedball - and his excessive drinking leading to his sobriety in the 1980s. Many friends, associates and fellow musicians, most who have covered at least one of his songs, talk about his importance in Canadian musical history and thus to their own careers.