The Watchman's Gone

On Gordon Lightfoot and getting real.

There’s a scene early in Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s 2019 Gordon Lightfoot documentary If You Could Read My Mind, in which the movie’s subject, spotting a Drake billboard while driving through Toronto, remarks, “All you have to do is listen to his records and you know why he’s doing so well.” Likewise, Lightfoot’s best records—especially his ‘70s collections of sturdy and smooth folk rock—demonstrate everything you need to know about the man: his impossibly propulsive 12-string strum; his miles wide voice; and most of all, his sensitive songs, which strip back the bark, exposing the very heart of things.

News of Lightfoot’s passing hits hard. Growing up with my dad, Gord’s Gold was a sacred text my brothers and I shared with him. Specifically 1988’s Gord’s Gold Vol. 2, featuring slick, syrupy and era appropriate re-records of earlier material (think of John Martyn’s material from the same time). But the sound of that compilation, that late ‘80s and early ‘90s soft rock sheen, is baked into my musical consciousness. When I began collecting vinyl in my late teens, Lightfoot titles were among the first I liberated from my dad’s dwindled collection of LPs, including those more naturalistic early albums.

Lightfoot’s admirers include Bob Dylan—who, in a state of seemingly abundant confusion, inducted Lightfoot into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 1986 JUNO Awards. “He’s somebody of rare talent and all that,” Dylan remarks, though at another instance, he puts it more eloquently: “Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever.”

I think of Dylan listening to “The Watchman’s Gone,” a nonconformist anthem from 1974’s Sundown, where it’s understandably overshadowed by numbers like “Carefree Highway,” “Seven Island Suite,” and the dread-soaked title track. But “The Watchman’s Gone” is the one I keep returning to, calling to mind other iconoclasts I admire: Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Terry Callier, Patti Smith, Richard Thompson, Karen Dalton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and even, hear me out, Lou Reed—or at least John Cale.

The watchman is an oppressor, needlessly “kicking your dreams about.” An all-seeing eye glaring. You have to wait it out, bide your time, wait for him to get bored and wander off.

“It feels so good
Knowing the watchman's gone
It's like a song
Knowing the watchman's gone”

Lightfoot isn’t the first guy you think of when you think of outlaw balladry, but you can hear that solitary drive in his songs, that willingness to embrace the dark along with the light. Perhaps it got lost in the gloss sometimes, but Lightfoot stayed real, all the way up until the end, touring as long as he could, committed to the realness of his songs. “That’s how you write songs—you get real,” he said. I’m thankful that he leaves so many behind in his departure.