Don Quixote, from beginning to end, is a superb album—certainly the best Lightfoot has ever put together….

The songs themselves are among his best—the title song is certainly the equal of Early Morning Rain …, Alberta Bound is a piece of superb Canadiana, and Christian Island is a hymn to a northern Ontario summer.

A magazine like this one is certainly no place to comment on the personal lives of composers—but it is hard to avoid doing so in the context of this particular album, because so many of the songs relate directly to Lightfoot's unhappy home life. Looking at the Rain, Ordinary Man and, particularly, Second Cup of Coffee, are all songs about lost love and loneliness—songs of pain, sung with feeling and with the warmth of past memories.

Lightfoot is, on the showing of this record, Canada's finest songwriter. And it seems a...