Assembled from a hospital bed, Gordon Lightfoot’s twentieth album almost never happened. Lightfoot was performing in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario, in the fall of 2002 when he collapsed onstage from a burst artery. He was airlifted to southern Ontario for emergency surgery but had already slipped into a coma, and it was touch-and-go for days on end.
When Lightfoot finally came to six weeks later and had allayed the worst fears of family and friends, he remembered having spent a couple of days in the recording studio earlier that year laying down practice tracks of new material. A long convalescence loomed, so Lightfoot dispatched his producer and band to orchestrate the rough vocal and guitar tracks with overdubs, add some unreleased concert recordings, and bring it all back to him for approval.
Thus was born Harmony. It’s not Lightfoot’s best effort, but it passes muster. His vocals, even after four decades in the music business, can still rivet with their lonesomeness and tenderness. On the overdubbed tracks, the instrumentation varies from superb to correct but oddly disconnected, although the live performances work nicely.
The lyrics may not have the bite of early Lightfoot tunes such as “For Lovin’ Me” or “Did She Mention My Name?”, but they’re polished, insightful and emotionally direct. One of the best numbers is a live recording, “The No Hotel”, a sketch of a seedy South American hotel and its dispirited patrons that might be the outline for a Graham Greene novel.
