If You Could Read My Mind

"If You Could Read My Mind" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot wrote the lyrics while he was reflecting on his own divorce. It reached 1 on the Canadian Singles Chart on commercial release in 1970 and charted in several other countries on international release in 1971. Theme Lightfoot cited his divorce for inspiring the lyrics. They came to him as he was sitting in a vacant Toronto house one summer. The song compares events in his relationship to a ghost movie and a paperback romance novel. The lyrics include "I don't know where we went wrong. But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back." At the request of his daughter Ingrid, he performed the lyrics with a slight change: The line "I'm just trying to understand the feelings that you lack" is altered to "I'm just trying to understand the feelings that we lack." Lightfoot said in an interview that the difficulty with writing songs inspired by personal stories is that there is not always the emotional distance and clarity to make lyrical improvements such as the one his daughter suggested. Production