A sense of calm has won the day.Īnd so it goes with 1967 Thunderbirds. My coworkers have long used my odd annoyances to tease me: “Is this cake moist, Aaron?” But no longer will the playing of “Wreck” wreck me. Now, after a years-long dispute with the seafaring classic, I can freely admit that this lyric is haunting: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” No longer did that wellspring of irrational spite manifest itself upon the receipt of those first few hits of that lonesome guitar. Lightfoot earlier this year, however, I had to admit to myself that for years I had been hating that song for the sake of tradition. That’s the kind of hand genetics dealt me in my younger days. Being a man of my word, I covered my check, left a tip, wished my friends a good night, and left. A folk singer was playing singer-songwriter hits of the ’60s and ’70s, and after he’d worked through about an hour of his set list, I mentioned that if he played “Edmund Fitzgerald,” I was walking out.

I was once eating dinner with some friends in the early 2000s. Lightfoot’s music quite a bit ( “Beautiful” and “Rainy Day People” are wonderful), but when it comes to that song, our Venn Diagram does not overlap.

One of my least favorite songs has always been “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by the late, great Gordon Lightfoot. Historically, any hatred I’ve harbored is focused on animal abuse, songs I think are terrible, food words, and perhaps even 1967 Thunderbirds. I like to think that I’m a “live and let live” kind of guy any malice I feel is not really malice, but short-lived annoyance that is extinguished almost as soon as it flares.

1969 thunderbird side mirror