Gordon Lightfoot's name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. He is unquestionably Canada's greatest songwriter, and an international star who has performed on the world's biggest stages. While Lightfoot's songs are well known, the man behind them is elusive. Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. Lightfoot takes us deep inside the artist's world, from his idyllic childhood in Orillia, the wild sixties, and his canoe trips into Canada's North to his heady times atop the music world. Jennings explores the toll that success took on his personal life - including his troubled relationships, his battle with alcohol and his near-death experiences - and the extraordinary drive and tenacity that pulled him through it all. The stories behind some of his best-known love songs, including "Beautiful" and "Song for a Winter's Night," as well as the infidelity and divorce that resulted in classics like "Sundown" and "If You Could Read My Mind." A portrait of a treasured singer-songwriter, an artist whose work has been covered by everyone from Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand and Nico to Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Gord Downie. An inspiring story of redemption. Nicholas Jennings was the music critic and feature writer for Maclean's from 1980 to 2000.