What if Arlo Guthrie had sung "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and Gordon Lightfoot had sung "Alice's Restaurant"?

The Hey Man does the necessary impersonations:

"He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here. We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry."

Said Geddy Lee of Rush, in a 2019 documentary about Gordon Lightfoot, quoted in "Gordon Lightfoot’s 10 Essential Songs/The Canadian singer-songwriter, who died on Monday at 84, brought his rueful baritone to memorable, melancholy material" (NYT).

I hadn't really thought enough about Canadians to have the notion that they were bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players or even to have noticed that they might feel sensitive about our thinking of them like that, if, in fact, we do think about them much, which, as I just said, I did not. Mostly, we — I, anyway — think about Canadians on an individual basis, when one of them serves up some excellent artistry and hand delivers it to us. We're not distracted by second-rate Canadians. In that light, they seem quite great. Take heart, Geddy Lee. Don't have an inferiority complex based on how other people think about your country. And, by the way, what's wrong with lumberjacks? It seems to me, America loves lumberjacks. I invite people to think of Wisconsin as full of lumberjacks. And hockey players. And sensitive artists.

Thank you, Gordon Lightfoot.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary, which says he wrote his first song when he was in high school, during the hula hoop craze. It contained the line: "I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time."

At Facebook, my son John wrote: "Here’s a live performance of his beautiful song 'If You Could Read My Mind' (1970), which he wrote about his divorce. In this video he sings, 'I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack,' which is in the original recording too. Later on when he played it live, he changed one word at his daughter’s request, instead singing '…the feelings that we lack.' He realized that the deeply personal subject matter had prevented him from being objective enough to think of that improvement."

Should a man run his writings past a woman to benefit from insight about what might offend women? We were just talking about a woman who gave a draft of her writing to her ex-husband and then rejected all his suggestions about how to soften the harshness toward him. The editor said his corrections would weaken the story. 

The song was "If You Could Read My Mind," so I don't know why it's a problem to be "prevented... from being objective." And why is subjectivity ever a problem for a singer? Imagine if Bob Dylan submitted "Positively 4th Street" to whoever the hell that song is about? Bob sticks to his point of view, which includes a wish that the person he's talking about could read his mind and know what a drag it is to see him.

Joni Mitchell said: "There came a point when I heard a Dylan song called 'Positively Fourth Street' and I thought 'oh my God, you can write about anything in songs.' It was like a revelation to me."

I've got 10 TikToks for you on this profound evening.

1. Close out Yom Kippur with Mandy Patinkin.

2. Gordon Lightfoot, an icon of old age.

3. The handsome dog.

4. Man in shorts.

5. Survival.

6. Shopping at Erewhon is the essence of anxiety.

7. Husband loves separate bedrooms.

8. Rethink "I'm only human."

9. An especially crazy Rube Goldberg Machine.

10. The holiday film written by bots.