If you could read my mind, love / What a tale my thoughts could tell / Just like an old-time movie sings Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023) through his 1970 ballad “If You Could Read My Mind.”
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The song, off the late Canadian singer and songwriter’s fifth album, Sit Down Young Stranger, was a letter to someone Lightfoot once loved and was ultimately losing at the time.
A Marriage Ended
One of Lightfoot’s most personal songs, “If You Could Read My Mind” was written about his deteriorating marriage to first wife Brita Ingegerd Olaisson. The couple were married in 1963 and had two children together, Ingrid and Fred, before their divorce in 1973.
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The lyrics came to Lightfoot one summer in 1969 while he was sitting in his empty house in Toronto that was up for sale.
“I was of course going through some emotional trauma leading up to a separation, so that of course manifested itself in that particular song on that particular afternoon,” said Lightfoot of the song in 2010, remembering the moment he wrote it more than 40 years earlier. “I’ll never forget the afternoon.”
Loss and Regret
The meaning of the song is evident in each verse. Lightfoot moves from ruminating to his own reflections on the relationship to feelings of loneliness and grief.
If you could read my mind, love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
‘Bout a ghost from a wishing well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I am a ghost, you can’t see
By the chorus, Lightfoot is trying to read his partner’s mind, and her perception of him at the time, In all honestly, he doesn’t shy away from calling himself a failure and owning up to his mistakes.
If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstore sells
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take
I’d walk away like a movie star
Who gets burned in a three-way script
Enter number two, a movie queen to play the scene
Of bringing all the good things out in me
But for now, love, let’s be real
The song progresses through the realization that the marriage has ended.
I never thought I could act this way
And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
Changing the Lyrics
When a song is so personal, it’s not often easy to have enough emotional distance to make any lyrical changes or improvements, but Lightfoot later acquiesced to a request by his daughter from his first marriage, Ingrid, to change one word in the song when he performed the song.
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At the request of his daughter, Lightfoot made one slight alteration to the verse I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack. Instead, he sang I’m just trying to understand the feelings that we lack when performing the song live.
Cover Story
“If You Could Read My Mind,” hit at No. 1 on the Canadian Singles chart and peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been covered nearly 200 times over the past 50-plus years.
Barbra Streisand, Don McLean, Andy Williams, Glen Campbell, Neil Young, Johnny Mathis, and Liza Minelli, are among the many artists who have covered Lightfoot’s classic. Johnny Cash also recorded the song, which was released on his posthumous album, American V: A Hundred Highways, in 2006.
In 2020, Amazon Prime released a documentary on Lightfoot, directed by Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni, called If You Could Read My Mind.
Photo by Mark Horton/Getty Images
