***This was one of my late night posts where it dropped after midnight, but I'm still claiming it for March 10 LOL***

This is a beautiful and haunting song from one of the giants of the singer songwriter movement in the early 70s, Gordon Lightfoot.  And it's a song that played a pretty significant role during a dark time in my life.

"If You Could Read My Mind" was Gordon's first really big commercial success.  First released in his native Canada, it hit #1 on the Canadian chart in late 1970.  After international release in 1971, it reached #5 in the US on the Billboard Hot 100, and #1 on the US Adult Contemporary chart.  It also found moderate chart success in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, cracking the top 30 in all 3.

He wrote it about his divorce, and it is definitely the most poignant song I've ever heard on that topic.  If you didn't know this about me....I'm a divorcée.  I fell in love with a girl in 1998...we had both just turned 21...juniors in college.  Nothing but time in front of us, and eager to build the "perfect life" together.  We were married in July of 2000, just 3 months after graduating from the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and about another 3 months shy of our 23rd birthdays (we were only about 3 weeks apart).  Things were rosy and looking up.

I had my pangs of doubt about various things from the get-go, and I'm sure she did too...but I thought that was natural and part of the process.  We got along well, enjoyed each other's company, and had lots of fun together on small weekend trips, Thursday night ice cream runs, Wednesday night dinners at the Cellar (our favorite restaurant), drives around town with our favorite tunes playing, and watching our favorite primetime TV shows.  We eventually bought a house, a couple of vehicles, and had lots of plans.

I won't go into all the details of how things fell apart...nobody did anything wrong...we just grew in different directions and looked up one day not feeling very good about still being inside this commitment.  Both of us feeling like we deserved more, and yet not hating the other.  In some ways, it was harder than if someone had just been awful, because nobody will judge you for leaving a marriage if your spouse is a monster or a deadbeat....but you'll get plenty of judgement when you both think highly of one another but just know with some time and experience that you're not right for marriage.  We didn't have kids, so it was a lot less complicated than it could have been.....but still, it was painful.

Because of the fact that we both wanted out, but couldn't find a justification that would satisfy "society", we started to resent each other....and what had been a fairly warm and friendly atmosphere turned very cold and transactional.  It's like we needed to get good and sick of each other in order to have the courage to break it off.  So the last 8 months or so were hellacious.  We barely spoke, largely slept in different rooms, found any and every excuse to be busy and apart from one another, and had silly arguments regularly about complete nonsense that we would have ignored a year earlier.  It was very painful, but I guess it's what we needed in order to move on at the time.

At any rate, I remember taking a drive with my older sister one evening feeling pretty low about the whole situation....I wanted out, but I also wanted to save it.  Nobody dreams of getting a divorce, for a hundred different reasons, including fear of the unknown, judgement from others, and a foreboding feeling of personal failure to name a few.  This song came on the radio station we were listening to, and it felt eerily relevant from the start....but when the line came up that says, "I never thought I could act this way and I've got to say that I just don't get it....I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back", I started full on crying.  I had to pull over because I couldn't drive safely.

That's when I knew I either had to get serious about trying to repair the ship, or cut my losses and move on.  She was going through a similar evaluation at the same time.  I decided to try to repair the ship, and she decided to move on.  I asked her on Valentine's Day (February 14) 2007 if we could go back to therapy and try to sort things out....on February 23 she informed me she had filed for divorce, and had made an exit plan to leave town...already had a job lined up and everything.

She was right....we were past the point where we really wanted to salvage it...I was just scared of going through the process.  But it was a very crushing moment that left me frazzled and a little panicked.  I spent much of the following weeks going through various stages of grief, and I kept listening to this song for perspective.  Ultimately, we've both moved on and lived great lives, and I don't resent her at all.  She did what I was too afraid to do.  I have always felt like this song helped me cope with the whole process, and I've never heard another song deal with this topic in such a thoughtful and nuanced way.  It's a beautiful piece of art, and in spite of its sad nature, it remains one of my favorite songs.  Thanks Gordon, for being there with me when I needed someone who understood.

Enjoy my cover of this song from March 5, 2024, and then check out a great performance of it by Gordon Lightfoot himself from a concert televised on the BBC in 1972. 

If you'd like to explore my piano method more deeply, my best students use my video courses and join me for conversation and twice monthly Q&A Livestreams in my private community...you can find it all HERE. Thanks.

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