Gordon Lightfoot: Don Quixote CD Track Listing

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Gordon Lightfoot Don Quixote (1972)
1994 Reprise Records, Inc. / Warner Archives\n\nOriginally Released 1972\nCD Edition Released June 28, 1994\n\nAMG EXPERT REVIEW: Perhaps one of his most Canadian releases, Don Quixote is a very pleasant folk sounding album. From "Alberta Bound" to "Christian Island" to "Ode to Big Blue," Lightfoot pays tribute to the many and varied places that make up his homeland. Also of note are such love songs as "Beautiful" and the lovely "Looking at the Rain." All in all, there's not a bad cut here. It's well worth your time. -- James Chrispell\n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nTop of his Game, July 11, 2003 \nBy A Customer\nI'm like most of the other reviewers in that I think that this is Lightfoot's best album by far!! I have had this LP for over 30 years and have worn it out, so it's time to buy the CD.\n\nNevertheless, this album does have its weak points. Three songs are mediocre at best. Patriot's Dream is a good antiwar song but the music and the lyrics don't work together. Ode to Big Blue is dull and repetitive, reminiscent of Edmund Fitzgerald. On Susan's Floor is neither lyrically or musically inspiring.\n\nOn the other hand, the other 8 tracks are nothing short of outstanding. The best cuts are the title track, Second Cup of Coffee, Alberta Bound, and Beautiful. "Beautiful" is probably the finest love song ever written, with stunning acoustic guitar work.\n\nI just can't get enough of this album. It reminds me of how good I feel when I visit Canada. Very uplifting and entertaining!! \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\n Quintessential Lightfoot, June 6, 2002 \nBy A Customer\n\nThis CD (album) is a very personal one for me as, back in 1972, I experienced my "Lightfoot Epiphany" when the song "Don Quixote" came on the radio. I had never heard anyone match such poetic, meaningful lyrics with such a gorgeous melody before--I rushed out on my bike and bought the album the next day.\nWell, I quickly discovered the whole album is like that: beautiful melodies, combined with incisive lyricism. (From this album, I backtracked to the earlier ones, and discovered the vast majority of his music fell into the same category!)\n\nThe title track will probably always show up on every Lightfoot fans "top ten" list, but this is an album filled with gems. Even the lone cover, Silverstein/Matthews' "On Susan Floor," fits right in with the tone of the rest of the songs on the album: as with just about all of the cover tunes Lightfoot has done over his career, he sings it like he wrote it.\n\nFrom the upbeat, toe-tapping "Alberta Bound" (featuring Ry Cooder on mandolin!), to one of the best songs I've heard about the musician's life on the road ("Ordinary Man,"), from the innocent joys expressed in "Brave Mountaineers," to the ethereal, meaningful "Ode to Big Blue," this is an album packed with treasures. Another Lightfoot favorite, "Beautiful" appears on this album as does the evocative "Christian Island (Georgian Bay).\n\nThe instrumentation is up there with Lightfoot's usual very high standards. Terry Clements makes his first recorded appearance on lead acoustic guitar (he's been the Lightfoot Band's touring lead guitarist ever since), complementing Red Shea, who contributes his as-ever innovative acoustic playing, along with dobro and classical guitar. Rick Haynes' bass playing on the album is some of his most melodic work, while still firmly anchoring the bottom end. In fact, the bass almost sounds like an acoustic bass on this album, with a warm, "woodsy" feel to it. The string arrangements, by Bob Thompson on the title track, and Nick DeCaro on several of the others (DeCaro also contributes additional instrumentation on some of the tracks) is very subtle and non-obtrusive, and very much adds to the overall musical "coloring" of the recordings. In fact, the string arrangements on Don Quixote call to mind the way Lightfoot currently uses synthesizers in his songs: by and large, they're not obtrusive; rather, they add an almost pastel-like coloring to the arrangements. And, of course, Lightfoot himself contributes his solid, tasteful acoustic rhythm guitar work.\n\nDon Quixote is, quite simply, a classic Gordon Lightfoot album. If you've purchased "Complete Greatest Hits," liked what you heard, and want to delve deeper into the musical magic that is Lightfoot, there are few places better to start than with Don Quixote. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nLightfoot At His Best, April 18, 2000 \nBy Kurt Harding "bon vivant" (Boerne TX)\nGordon Lightfoot came to my attention back when I was in Jr. High. I first heard him on old San Diego adult contemporary station KDEO and have been a fan ever since. He played in San Diego while Don Quixote was current and seeing him live then gave me an unshakable attachment to the album. Lightfoot has rarely received the commercial acclaim he deserves although the romantic "Beautiful" was a minor hit. While a very good song, it is not the best on Don Quixote. There is something for everyone here: Lightfoot the romantic, Lightfoot the storyteller, Lightfoot in tune with the outdoors, and Lightfoot man of peace. All songs are well-written and well-arranged and performed in vintage Lightfoot fashion. My favorite cuts are "Looking at the Rain", "Ordinary Man", "Big Blue", and "Second Cup of Coffee". The album is so good, you can see that Lightfoot was inspired. He has given us much through the years, but Don Quixote ranks as one of his best. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nAging much more gracefully than I!!, December 14, 1998 \nBy A Customer\nThis is a great album. I was watching a show on whales and "Ode to Big Blue" started running through my mind (along with Country Joe's "Save The Whales"). I'd let this disc slip my mind, & I picked it up soon after. Even though I did sort of burn out on the song "Don Quixote" when it was getting lots of AM airplay, listening to this CD whipped me right back to December,1972, when two of my all-time favorite albums were released on the same day: "Don Quixote" and War's "The World is A Ghetto". \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nAnother exceptional album - vintage Lightfoot!, August 23, 1998 \nBy Valerie L. Shainin "Valerie Magee" (Castle Rock, CO USA)\nDon Quixote was Lightfoot's third album for Warner Bros. and his 8th overall (he released his 19th original album - A Painter Passing Through - in May, 1998). Along with his first Warner Bros. album, If You Could Read My Mind, and his most successful album on the Billboard charts, Sundown, Don Quixote showcases Lightfoot's singing and songwriting, and is a fine example of where this versatile artist was musically in the early 70s.\n\nThe album is a wonderful collection of songs including some of the best and most popular he has written. There is not a top 10 hit on this album, but don't let that fool you into thinking there's no gold here. Every single song is superb, and today - 26 years later - Lightfoot is still performing no fewer than five of the songs from this album in concert. This includes the title song, Don Quixote, which contains some of the most brilliant lyrics he has ever written (and that is saying a lot!) plus Beautiful, Ode To Big Blue, Christian Island and On Susan's Floor, the last by Shel Silverstein and Vince Matthews.\n\nThematically, this album is a sampling of what inspired and still inspires him ... love and love lost (Second Cup Of Coffee is one of his most poignant autobiographical songs), Canada, the outdoors and the environment, the tragedy of war, ships and the water, to name just a few. Even a collection such as Gord's Gold, with many more songs, fails to offer such a broad array of themes from a songwriter who writes so brilliantly about so many things in a way few others can.\n\nThis is an album you will surely enjoy. \n\n\nHalf.com Details \nContributing artists: Ry Cooder \nProducer: Lenny Waronker \n\nAlbum Notes\nPersonnel: Gordon Lightfoot, Red Shea, Richard Haynes, Terry Clemens.\n\nIndustry Reviews\n...he's at his absolutely strongest right now....His sentimentality now seems genuine but controlled...\nRolling Stone (04/27/1972)\n\n\nROLLING STONE REVIEW\nGordon Lightfoot may never seem to be doing anything all that unusual--his melodies tend to be simple, his subjects seldom original, his voice is nice enough but rarely lends itself to anything fancy, and in fact the whole genre he works in is anything but new. But Lightfoot, unlike virtually all other folk artists who started out successful in the early Sixties, has managed to mellow so gracefully (and without any need for a current comeback, or any gratuitous shots at rock and roll) that he's at his absolute strongest right now, as Don Quixote and the album before it bear witness. Even though--or perhaps because --what he does isn't nearly as unusual as the fact that he does it so well.\n\nLightfoot's music has gotten so tight and polished, all the while sustaining a deceptive sense of effortlessness, that the weaker strains of his early days have virtually disappeared. His sentimentality now seems genuine but controlled, and it is less dominant than in the past. He has learned how to avoid sounding self-indulgent in love songs, or affected when he sings about being on the road. His key to sidestepping the obvious pitfalls of his subject matter is the tough, quietly understated masculinity he's able to maintain throughout whatever situation he cares to describe. The toughness is something of a surprise, coming hand-in-hand with a relatively gentle sound, and the incongruity undoubtedly accounts for a good part of his mystique.\n\nThe rest of his appeal must certainly stem from his considerable gift for songwriting, which is easy to underrate. He combines the kind of voice that never seems to do his material justice with deceptive simplicity, a highly sophisticated ear for clever rhyme structures, and a unique knack for elevating subjects that could easily have been mundane. And, prolific as he's been over the past ten years, Lightfoot has never degenerated into hackdom. His writing, like the rest of what goes into his recordings, has improved steadily with age.\n\nStarting around the time of his first and only hit single ("If You Could Read My Mind"), Lightfoot has assembled three albums of unassailable quality. The first, originally called Sit Down Young Stranger but retitled for the hit it contained, linked the excesses of his earlier work with a toned-down, more studied new sound that marked an enormous improvement. The next album, Summer Side Of Life, had a first side that should have been minted in gold, although side two never quite measured up. While Don Quixote is too evenly paced to match the best moments or dazzling versatility of its predecessor, it has no such noticeable lapses either. It is consistently good, beautifully produced, as well-played as ever (Lightfoot has added guitarist Terry Clements to his fine bass-guitar team of Rick Haynes and Red Shea), and a fitting next step in a career of steady improvement.\n\nCertain structural strains from the past two albums tend to repeat themselves here, such as his use of the opening cut to present the album's dominant image of a romantic, mysterious traveler (here he's Don Quixote, last time the hitchhiking minstrel of "Ten Degrees And Getting Colder"), and the long, ambitious conclusion ("The Patriot's Dream"). In between, he seems to have shifted away from the straight storytelling he handles so well, using more mood pieces than usual (up for "Alberta Bound," down in "Looking At The Rain," and somewhere in between with the slow, dreamy "Christian Island"). The album has its closest thing to weak moments with the slightly mawkish "Beautiful" and melodramatic "Susan's Floor," which Lightfoot didn't write (Shel Silverstein did). But they are more than made up for by "Ode To Big Blue," a terse little ecological-style number about a whale.\n\n"Ordinary Man" has a fine melody and sounds like a possible single. So does "Second Cup Of Coffee," indirectly telling a story of broken marriage with a typically clever refrain about reaching for the bottle versus reaching for the phone. It's the kind of song that sounds so immediate and familiar that you're certain you must have heard it before, the only question being where. But still it's as original as everything else he does, fresh and unique behind a familiar-sounding facade. I just don't know how he does it.\n\nThe fact is I can't quite figure out how he does any of it, really, but I do know that his material never wears out, just gets more interesting all the time. Gordon himself keeps getting better and better, and that's one knack I hope he never loses. (RS 107 -- Apr 27, 1972) -- JANET MASLIN
This folk cd contains 11 tracks and runs 41min 49sec.
Freedb: 9f09cb0b

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