DULUTH — If you notice that David James Carlson kind of looks like Gordon Lightfoot, you're not the first to do so.

"People would always say, 'Are you Gordon's brother?'" Carlson remembered. "He would come over, put his arm around my shoulder, shaking me, kind of laughing. He'd say, 'Yeah, he's my little brother!'"

Carlson met Lightfoot in Minneapolis in 1978. "We just hit it off," Carlson remembered. "We talked for like an hour at Northrop, after the show, backstage. Then he said, 'What are you doing tomorrow night? ... Why don't you come up to Duluth and hear me play up there?'"

The conversation continued after Lightfoot's show the following night at the Duluth Arena Auditorium, and the two men continued to connect over the years until Lightfoot's death in 2023.

Carlson, a singer-son

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