Though “Sundown” was the biggest hit at the time, and manages more streams in the present, “If You Could Read My Mind” feels like Gordon Lightfoot‘s biggest song. Maybe that’s because of all the covers – it has been covered something like 30 more times than any other Lightfoot song (nearly 4 times as much as “Sundown”). And, of course, there was that weird ’90s dance pop cover that was a hit too, the only Lightfoot cover to be such a big (relatively) recent hit. It feels like it’s a bit more in our popular consciousness than “Sundown.”
Mark Ward is an Alaskan-born, Washington-based power pop/roots musician who has been self-releasing albums for the last few years. His latest is a collection of covers called Translator. “If You Could Read My Mind” is the biggest song on the collection. As an aside, Ward’s proximity to Canadian radio is obvious on this record, as fully one third of the songs are originally by Canadian artists.
And since he plays power pop, a power pop cover is what we get, complete with hooky synthesizer. The tempo is upbeat, the drums are strident, the guitars are jangly and The Cars-esque synthesizer introduces a catchy element to focus the song around.
Though Ward sings the lyrics pretty similarly to the original, he does play a bit with the intonation. The result is that there is far less yearning and regret to the performance. If anything, the song now sounds like a bit of a putdown to the other person, albeit a mild one, or the announcement of a clear break with the past, rather than a lament for lost love.
Listen below:
