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Rush’s Geddy Lee, Sarah McLachlan and Alec Baldwin appear in If You Could Read My Mind, a documentary on Gordon Lightfoot, streaming on-demand this summer.
Directed by Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni, the film chronicles present-day Lightfoot performing a show and signing autographs as he fondly looks back on his nearly six-decade career — from his coffeehouse performance days in Ontario, Canada, to his rise to international fame in the Seventies.
“He is one of the greatest examples of timeless singer-songwriter,” Lee says in the clip, sitting alongside his bandmate Alex Lifeson. “He’s a Canadian national hero, but he also speaks with a voice for everyone,” adds Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin. 
Lightfoot also breaks down the making of his 1966 song “Early Morning Rain.” “I knew that I had to sit down and do the work,” he tells the camera. “That turned out to be one of my biggest, most important tunes.”
Photos from the Seventies — including Lightfoot with Bob Dylan — are interspersed throughout the trailer, with a vintage clip of Lightfoot joking to a talk show host that alcohol helps maintain his prolific career.
“There was a beauty in what he was writing about, but there was a lot of internal pain that none of us would know about,” Lenny Waronker, a long-time record producer and former head of Reprise Records, says. “And it makes you love him, because you just have to listen to his lyrics, and then you get it.”
