On a blustery night in November 1975, Gordon Lightfoot was sitting in his writing room on the third floor of his Beaumont Road house in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood, working on songs for his next album. Needing more fuel for the task, he headed downstairs to his kitchen for coffee. A report on the 11 p.m. CBC news told him of the sinking of a giant freighter, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, in a fierce storm and the loss of all 29 men aboard. “I remember it so well,” Lightfoot told biographer Nicholas Jennings. “The wind was howling even in Toronto that night, and I went back up to the attic thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like up on Lake Superior. It must’ve been awful. I didn’t ...
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