After yesterday's post about Gordon Lightfoot coming to Lincoln in July, reader jk emailed, "Can he still sing?"

He sounds pretty good to me in these clips from 2007.

The 2008 review of an Ohio show (Singer's delivery adds to poignancy) seems to say he can still sing. His voice is different, but works within different limits:

He took the stage gaunt but garrulous, aged yet eager, the survivor of a 2001 illness that left him in a coma for weeks. His voice threatened to give out before the end of every song, especially in the upper register, where it sometimes cracked. Still, he was as persistent at the end of the second set as in the first song.

The formerly rich resonance in the bottom was all but gone, but the lifelong habit of top-loading every phrase with emphasis has paid off in the autumn of his career, when it is truly difficult for him to sustain the volume throughout. His attack sounds nearly as natural today as it did 40 years ago.

Lightfoot's diminished sound lent a bittersweet tone to songs such as A Painter Passing Through and lines such as "I was in my prime, once along the way." It lent added weight to the wizened advice in others such as 14 Karat Gold.

Going into it knowing it's not going to be a flashback seems a good attitude.

Here's the flashback: Lightfoot live at 35, 35 years ago.