“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. The version heard here is by the Tony Rice Unit, from the 1979 album “Manzanita,” a record that helped show how a contemporary songwriter’s work could be reimagined within bluegrass.
