5 Feet of Fury

‘If you didn’t grow up in Canada in the ’70s it’s hard to describe the importance of Gordon Lightfoot’

Rick McGinnis writes:

His music was literally everywhere, a string of hits (“Early Morning Rain,” “Bitter Green,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Summer Side of Life,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”) that were constantly on the radio, soundtracking the decade with a subtle but persistent melancholy and a peculiarly northern romanticism that was tentative but intense and fully anticipatory of regret and heartbreak.

Did I want to try and capture all of that with my photos in that ravine on a pleasant weekday morning? I’d like to hope that I was that ambitious, somewhere beneath my nervousness. Mostly I wanted to get a really flattering cover shot for a man who’d made seventeen records already and had sat for countless photo shoots. It all felt quite momentous – a few years earlier I was a punk kid shooting hardcore bands in dingy shithole clubs, and now I was doing album photos for a Canadian musical icon.