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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

East of Midnight

album by Gordon Lightfoot

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ5329769 ↗
Source-derived summary

East of Midnight is Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot's sixteenth studio album, released in 1986 on the Warner Bros. Records label. The album reached #165 on the Billboard 200.

Lightfoot enlisted keyboardist and producer David Foster on the song "Anything for Love", which reached #13 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #71 on the Country chart.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “East of Midnight” is album by Gordon Lightfoot. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through East, Midnight and album, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1986—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1986. For this dossier, East, Midnight and album is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “album by Gordon Lightfoot” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5329769. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986.

Critical limits

Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “East of Midnight”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow East of Midnight primary sources, East of Midnight archive and East research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “East of Midnight”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “East of Midnight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.