I am a fan of Gordon Lightfoot — I even had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing him almost two decades ago promoting a show at Merrill Auditorium. When he passed last year in May, it was sad time, for sure. If, like me, you enjoy the story songs that he created, like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” or the popular “Sundown” and the poignant “Early Morning Rain,” you would do well to head to the Somerset Abbey on Saturday the 28th of this month because Maine-based singer/songwriter/guitarist Tom DiMenna plans to perform his Tom Sings Gordon show.

In a recent interview, he talked about his past before moving to Maine, his love of music and how he came to pay homage to Lightfoot with this show. Our chat began by me asking where he was calling from.
A: I’m calling from a beach community in Wells called Drake’s Island; it’s where I spent my summers as a kid. I play at Cliff House Lounge in Ogunquit on Tuesdays and whenever I play there my friends here in Wells let me hang out at their house after the gig.

Q: How does living in Maine inform what you do, or does it?
A: It’s a big piece of it, actually. I came because there was opportunity here from a musical standpoint. I had heard from some other people that had been up here that there was just a lot of love for music, a lot of opportunities to play in front of people, and I was really chasing that coming out of New York where you’re just a needle in a haystack. I heard that up here there was a breeding ground where you could really get good at something, so I thought, “I’ll go to Maine,” and I loved Maine because I spent all my summers there as a kid, “and I’ll just hustle and I’ll just play every brewery and every restaurant and just get good!” So that’s what it means to me (laughter).

Q: (Chuckle) That makes sense.
A: I’m a folk/rock guy and I like sea shanties and I can kind of play the songs that I want to play without pandering too much and those songs are the songs that speak to a lot of Mainers.

Q: For example?
A: When I play “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I really get people’s attention and their respect and it’s wonderful, that was just born out of playing at breweries for a while when I realized that there was something here that I could polish up into a real show.

Q: Well, that’s a good segue because I was just about to talk about your Tom Sings Gordon show that you’re bringing to the Somerset Abbey in Madison on the 28th of this month. So I’ve got to ask: How did you come to take on this task of playing his music?
A: I was really obsessed with Cat Stevens as a kid, I knew every single song of his, I was a Cat Stevens geek, and my first big show in a theater was a Cat Stevens tribute that went pretty well, and I thought, “OK, I’ll do this for a while and maybe that will get me to the next thing where I’m doing my own songs.” And then the pandemic hit and it kind of squashed the whole Cat Stevens show; so I went back to playing smaller gigs just to get back in the groove. I was playing at some brewery in Westbrook or Gorham and people weren’t paying any attention to Cat Stevens, but when I played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” everything changed, everyone stopped eating and looked.

Q: I can see where that would have an effect on you, for sure.
A: Well, I recognized that I sounded like him pretty effortlessly. I didn’t have to really do a big caricature like I did for Cat which was a real effort to channel him. But with Gordon it was much more natural, and I had always loved “Sundown.” It was the first song of his that I heard on a jukebox in Chicago and it was the coolest song I had ever heard.

Q: I agree completely.
A: And by the time I was looking for something I could do post-pandemic, I thought, “OK, I think there’s something about me and Gordon Lightfoot that’s just gelling here!” So I learned more of his songs and the deeper I got into him, the more I was getting pleasure from the whole thing; I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to be able to take this ride and I don’t have to do anything, all I have to do it stick to the songs!” His songs are so fun to sing, I don’t know how else to say it, they’re just so fun to sing, you get locked in on it and you’re just along for the ride.

Q: He had such a catalog of songs over the course of his career, how do you choose which ones to sing?
A: I started getting requests from people asking for songs I wasn’t familiar with, so I learned “Beautiful” and “Did She Mention My Name?”, “Ghost of Cape Horn” and all these really terrific songs that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. But now I’ve got about 30 songs at the ready that I really like doing. Sometimes I do solos or sometimes I do it with the band.

Q: Which brings up another question: When you come to Somerset Abbey will you be solo or will you have other musicians with you?
A: I’ve got this terrific guy that I met, he’s a sound engineer at the Waldo Theater in Waldoboro, and his name is Eddie Holm. I was doing my solo Gordon show there one night and he thought it was really great. We got talking and became friends, he was around for that music when it was coming on. Anyway, he’s a great fit, he plays the bass and does a lot of the fun things that are giving the flavor of the recordings that I couldn’t do with pedals and what not. He’s willing to travel with me. We went all the out to the Great Lakes and did Montréal and Toronto, and he’s just bought in on it completely, so it’s been really nice. He’s really special.

Q: Is there anything, Tom that you’d like me to pass on to the folks reading this article?
A: Just that we’re super excited to go to that part of Maine. We haven’t played the Somerset Abbey before; we’ve just been doing coastal places because that’s where I live. And because we’ve been doing this for a while now, we’re getting a set list that we feel people really enjoy, and I have a feeling that it will go over quite well. (www.tomdimennamusic.com)

Lucky Clark, a 2018 “Keeping the Blues Alive” Award winner, has spent more than 50 years writing about good music and the people who make it. He can be reached at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.