Song of the Day 5/2: Gordon Lightfoot, “If You Could Read My Mind”

Flags in Canada should be at half-staff today — singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, considered the nation’s troubadour, died yesterday at age 84.

Lightfoot, who came out of the same Toronto folk scene that nurtured Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, first reached the Canadian charts in 1962. But he was little known in the US until this song hit the airwaves in early 1971.

The vivid imagery of his cinematic similes, an oblique summation of the collapse of his first marriage, propelled the second single from Lightfoot’s 1970 LP “Sit Down Young Stranger” to the top of Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart and No. 5 on the Hot 100. (The failed first single was a pre-Joplin cover of “Me and Bobby McGee.”) The album was quickly retitled for the hit.

Over the years Lightfoot, who gave his last concert just 10 days before his death, sang “If You Could Read My Mind” thousands of times, usually accompanying himself on guitar. Those performances miss the record’s subtly arranged strings, courtesy of prolific producer Nick DeCaro, which lend the single a pathos live versions lack.

Lightfoot, who acknowledged that his philandering doomed his first marriage, revised one key lyric in later years. At the urging of his daughter, he changed the lyric in the last verse from “the feeling that you lack” to “the feeling that we lack.”

Dozens of singers, including Barbra Streisand, Don McLean and Johnny Cash, have covered “If I Could Read Your Mind.” One notable artist who didn’t: Frank Sinatra, who reportedly threw down the song sheets in the studio, saying, “I can’t sing this.”

Stars on 54 had no such problem. They gave the song its most incongruous treatment in 1998 when their disco treatment turned it into a huge dance hit.