“Trains and Boats and Planes” is the title of a Burt Bacharach song about love lost to travel. The phrase also perfectly captures Gordon Lightfoot’s lifelong fascination with the machinery of those forms of transportation and, more poetically, tales of romance and tragedy involving them. So many of Lightfoot’s songs reflect this interest. Three of his most famous compositions, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “Early Morning Rain,” tell of the building of the trans-Canada railway, the sinking of an iron-ore-carrying freighter and of big 707 jetliners taking off without a young homesick Lightfoot aboard. Throughout his l...
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