RealGordonLightfoot

That one is so easy, it's the family. It's the extended family. They are the rainy day people.

You know, that's a tough question to answer. It really is. I wish I could give you an answer to that one! Topical songs, you know... are very difficult to come by. Every once in a while. And the Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time, anything I'd seen in the newspapers or magazines were very short, brief articles, and I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself. And it was quite an undertaking to do that, I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because i already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about 3 and a half years old. I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music. That's where the melody comes from, from an old Irish folk song.

That's an interesting one!

Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin'! And that's how I wrote the song "Sundown," and as a matter of fact, it was written just around Sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album.

There's a lot of the information required to answer that.

Well, I usually start - sometimes I start with finding something that would make a good title. From a newspaper, or a billboard, or maybe on the subway, haha! And then get a melody and some chords, and try to turn the title into a song, make sure to repeat it with regularity.

And that's it- the chords, the words and the melody. If you want to start with a title, you can take a title and turn it into a song if you want to. I did that with my song "Carefree Highway" - I took it from a road sign. It came from seeing a road sign in Arizona.

Well, I mean, it's sort of self-explanatory, isn't it? I mean, it was that kind of a night - I didn't know what my girlfriend was doing while I was writing a song, and things were already a little bit shaky such as it was, and I could just sort of picture somebody, you know, maybe trying to pick up my girlfriend while she was out at the bar and I was at home working on all these songs, and the sun was going down and it was getting late! And that meant coming into your territory, that's what it means.