Classical guitarist opens up about her male muses
Lightfoot, Trudeau Sr. and Prince Philip lent inspiration to Liona Boyd
In 2016, Liona Boyd was at her winter home in Florida working on a song in honour of Gordon Lightfoot when she popped out to the garage for a moment, only to slip on a piece of cardboard.
“Down I went, and with a sickening crash I heard my right shoulder and knee smash on the concrete,” she writes in her latest memoir. “The pain was excruciating … I saw with horror that two spiked pieces were sticking out of my shattered kneecap, and a concave hollow had appeared where my shoulder should have been.”
Boyd was airlifted to Toronto for surgery and eventually transferred to a rehabilitation centre, where she managed to finish the song. Lightfoot is one of the tunes on her latest album, No Remedy for Love, which is also the title of her second memoir.
The memoir picks up where the first one, In My Own Key: My Life in Love and Letters, left off in chronicling the ongoing adventures, romances and challenges of the woman known as Canada’s First Lady of the Guitar.
Born in England and raised in Toronto, Boyd has travelled around the world to perform for dignitaries and regular fans alike. She defied the male-dominated classical-music industry and released dozens of albums until a neurological condition called musicians’ focal dystonia, diagnosed more than 10 years ago, affected her playing ability.
That’s when Boyd started to reinvent herself, reviving her music career by writing, singing and recording her own songs. No Remedy For Love is her fifth singer-songwriter album.
Today, the injuries have healed, and Boyd says she hardly feels the 11 screws in her shoulder. She’s even back to her yoga practice and daily walks.
Meanwhile, the memoir reveals that Lightfoot isn’t the only man to have inspired Boyd over the years. Here are five, including Lightfoot, who have served as a muse for the willowy 69-year-old, whose voice still bears a trace of a British accent.
JULIAN BREAM
When she was 13, Boyd and her mother attended a Toronto concert by the English guitar virtuoso. She was hooked. “It changed my whole life,” she recalls. “On the occasion when I met him, I said ‘I owe my whole career to you.’ It’s amazing how one concert can resonate with youngsters, and the next thing you know they’re playing guitar. It opens up a whole new world.” Her parents gave her a guitar that Christmas, and she never
looked back.
GORDON LIGHTFOOT
Boyd’s career got a big boost when Lightfoot recruited her as his opening act on an arena tour in the late 1970s. “He was at the peak of his career with Edmund Fitzgerald, and it was fantastic for him to take me on tour the way he did. That helped introduce thousands and thousands of people to classical guitar,” Boyd says. “These days you couldn’t do it. I was playing Debussy and Bach in front of a pop crowd, but it was the ’70s and
people were different. I know they wouldn’t have the attention span now to sit through half an hour of classical guitar.”
PIERRE TRUDEAU
Boyd carried on an eight-year romance with the late prime minister (and father of the current prime minister), who was 30 years her senior. “I cared deeply for Pierre but I was not totally in love with him,” she says, adding that she wrote a song for him that was never recorded.
PRINCE PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH
Boyd has been exchanging actual paper-and-ink letters with the Queen’s 97-year-old husband for more than 30 years. Their relationship is that of penpals, Boyd notes. “It’s never, ever been romantic between us. I once asked if I could give him a hug when he was in Toronto, and he shook his head, no, and gave
me a kiss on each cheek,” she says. “That’s the closest I’ve ever got. You don’t hug in the Royal Family.” She wrote him a song, though, and was invited to Windsor Castle last year to perform it for His Royal Highness. The song, Love of the Horses, is on the new album.
ANDREW DOLSON
The handsome young singerguitarist who’s been performing with Boyd in recent years hails from Waterloo, and was discovered by Boyd’s mother when he was the subject of a local magazine article. “He’s perfect,” Boyd says of the 27-year-old. “Very sensitive, expressive and the right personality to be my duo partner. And he has a lovely girlfriend so I’m not a cougar. It’s so nice to be able to mentor up-and-coming musicians.” Dolson also appears with Boyd in her Winter Fantasy Christmas special, to be broadcast on PBS on Dec. 10.