Is Gordon Lightfoot the best songwriter of modern times? He has written and recorded upwards of one hundred and fifty songs, of which at least ninety are not only "keepers" but demonstrably superior, in one way or another, to most of their contemporaries. I know of no one else who has lately produced such quality in such quantity. He's at it again in his just-released "Shadows" with eleven new ones, and ten of them are beauties as engrossing as they are elegantly structured.

What makes Lightfoot great, I think, is his believability…. [He is one of the few pop stars] with such command of the English language that he can use word play as an end in itself. And so he writes with the folkie's sense of what is real even as he writes with the trained musician's awareness of the many possible ways of expressing it.

Of...