Gordon Lightfoot – If You Could Read My Mind

11th December 2020 · 1970s, 1971, Music

Gordon Lightfoot’s timeless tune If You Could Read My MInd unwittingly provided the template for Whitney Houston’s hit The Greatest Love Of All.

Here’s a song I somehow missed out earlier, perhaps because it wasn’t nearly as big a hit as I remembered: only no.30 in the summer of 1971. But it left its impression on me. There’s a YouTube comment that sums up its appeal perfectly: “This song gives me memories I don’t even have.”

It’s one of those early singer-songwriter tunes that blends
elements of folk and pop, timeless in its universal appeal. I loved it then and I love it now. Lightfoot was already a big star in his native Canada and this song was apparently inspired by his divorce, the lyrics coming to him when he was sitting in an empty Toronto house.

If you don’t know it but it sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that. In 1987 Lightfoot filed a lawsuit against Michael Masser, composer of The Greatest Love Of All – a hit for George Benson in 1977 and Whitney Houston in 1985 – alleging plagiarism.

The melody is clearly exactly the same in both, specifically the section that goes “I never thought I could act this way and I 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” has the identical melody to the bit when Whitney sings the section beginning “I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow.”

Lightfoot said later: “It really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t want the present-day generation to think that I stole my song from him.” However, he dropped the lawsuit when he felt it was having a negative effect on Houston, which he thought unfair as the case was only against the songwriter and not her.

In the end Masser settled out of court and issued a public apology and Lightfoot is still going strong at 82 – earlier in 2020 he recorded his first album in 16 years.