Gordon Lightfoot wrote “Cold on the Shoulder” and recorded it for Reprise as the title track of his tenth studio album, released in 1975. The lyric is built on a list of what a couple needs — time, trust, faith — each followed by what those things will do for them, and returns to a refrain about it being cold on the shoulder and getting a little older every day. A line in the trust verse says the singer does not want to know everything the other person has done.
The song reached bluegrass through Tony Rice. His first recorded Lightfoot song was “Ten Degrees (and Getting Colder)” on J.D. Crowe and the New South’s Rounder album (Rounder 0044), and over his career he recorded seventeen of Lightfoot’s songs. In the liner notes to the 1996 compilation Tony Rice Sings Gordon Lightfoot he said, “Once I found out that Lightfoot’s tunes were very adaptable to a bluegrass or string band genre, then I was off and running.”
Rice recorded “Cold on the Shoulder” in January 1983 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, and made it the opening track and title of his Rounder album, released in 1984 (Rounder 0183). He sang and played guitar, with Sam Bush on mandolin, Béla Fleck on banjo, Vassar Clements on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on dobro and Todd Phillips on bass. The album also includes his reading of Lightfoot’s “Bitter Green.” The 1996 compilation carries the song again, as track 16.
