The Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Talking to Tedd on the phone. It’s been a year in quarantine now. Solitary confinement. The boredom is crushing. Nobody does anything, and nothing ever happens. We struggle for things to talk about.
We discussed Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald for a good five minutes. We noted that the song, which drones on like a funeral dirge, is like 75 verses long. It’s impossible to remember the lines because three-quarters of them are about the weather. Also, in an apparent misguided ode to Longfellow, some of the lines are forced to rhyme with Gitche-Gumee.
You can tell that the song was written by a Canadian, I observed, because it has the line “The ship was the pride of the American side,” which no American would write. “He’s writing from the opposite side of Lake Superior,” I deduced. Tedd corrected me. “No, if it’s the opposite side, it would be called Lake Inferior.” We laughed at this. The stupidity of it.
Still on the Lightfoot thing, we speculated as to whether Gordon’s family called themselves the Lightfoots or the Lightfeet. Then we transitioned to Sundown, which has bizarre lyrics of another kind. After reciting the line “Sundown, you better take care, if I find you’ve been creeping ‘round my back stairs,” Tedd hypothesized that this song was about anal sex. “This is the gay interpretation,” he explained. So then we analyzed the song from that perspective for a good while to test the merit.
Since the subject of the song is a “hard lovin’ woman”, we eventually decided that Sundown was a song about a straight man who was suspicious that at sundown his girlfriend was going to try to peg him in the you know where. All that “creepin’ round my back stairs” business. “You better take care” being a warning that he was on to her.
Look up the lyrics yourself. You’ve got nothing but time.
