Gordon Lightfoot - Did She Mention My Name download mp3 flac

It wasn't until "Back Here on Earth"--Gordon Lightfoot's fourth and final album for United Artists--that he began to forge his mature sound, but each of the three preceding albums is interesting in its own right. "Lightfoot!", the first, contains some great individual songs but comes off as a little too aw-shucks folky; "The Way I Feel" is the best of the four UA albums, with consistently strong songwriting and just enough embellishment from the backing musicians. "Did She Mention My Name?", unfortunately, is all over the map. Sometimes it sounds like latter-day Monkees, sometimes it sounds like Muzak with a vocal tacked on as an afterthought; only occasionally does it sound like Lightfoot himself. There are some powerful songs (the title track, 'Black Day in July', 'Boss Man') but too much of the album relies on producer John Simon's cumbersome orchestration, and the tracks steeped most heavily in strings and woodwinds seem to be sketches rather than fully-fledged songs, serving merely as nails on which to hang Simon's baroque arrangements. (Even the lyrics, full of languid references to rain-drenched forests and wood fires a-blazing, appear to have been written with swollen orchestration in mind.) The overall impression is one of decadent bonelessness, a strange departure from Lightfoot's customarily direct, unpretentious approach. Two and a half stars.

(There is one apparently experimental track, 'Something Very Special', in whose favor the heavy string arrangements actually work. Constructed around a single, minimal chord change, the song relates the eerie tale of a long-departed lover as an increasingly uneasy clatter of instruments shifts and swells beneath Lightfoot's voice--suggesting that perhaps there's a ghostly element to the story which the narrator himself only faintly suspects. This one wouldn't have sounded out of place in a film like "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" or an episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery".)

Not quite as accessible as earlier Lightfoot albums as the orchestrations seem to smother some of the songs on occasion. Some great tracks though all the same. The title track is a classic as is 'Boss Man' and 'The Last time I saw her'. Watch out for later pressings which often abridge the album.