“Home From the Forest” is a song by the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, recorded in the mid-1960s and released on his 1967 album “The Way I Feel.”
The song is a portrait of a lonely old man making his way through a city at night. Its central image turns the city into a “forest” — a wilderness of neon lights, hard sidewalks, and indifferent strangers — through which the old man stumbles toward a cold and empty room. The lyric, often understood as a portrait of a forgotten war veteran, drew compassionate attention to age, poverty, and isolation at a time when such subjects were rarely sung about.
Though it came from the folk singer-songwriter world, the song’s spare melody and weathered storytelling made it well suited to acoustic interpretation.
