I'm Not the Kind to Live in the Past Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Let the heavens sing out: There's a new Al Stewart record. I've never been a tremendous fan, all I've got is a best-of and one inferior-by-consensus later record. But the collection was one of the first CDs I ever bought, and probably the only one out of the initial batch I still listen to regularly. Year of the Cat is right up there with Baker Street as pure Seventies art pop: overlong, worldly wise, studio-fortified. And Time Passages still makes me want to blow my brains out--the mark of any good AM-radio hit.

His "album" cuts are a little goofier, all those sprawling story songs about the siege of Stalingrad and the Race to the Pole. I don't know many of them, but the ones I've heard have a certain versimilitude and literacy that takes them out of the territory of hammy art-rock. (Of course, now I can't think of a single example of a dopey historically themed prog song. Help, anyone?)

At any rate, the new track I heard on the radio on the drive in was maybe not mind-blowing, but enough to get me interested. We'll see.

You know, I had a whole post ready to go about religion, morals, the whole megillah, but Al was more interesting. Maybe later.

@ 6:58:00 AM,

2 Comments:

At 12:10 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

(I'll delurk for the moment)

The Red Baron [as in "Snoopy vs"]?

I'm sure if I wasn't trying to remember them at the moment that a dozen different "balladesque" type ditties from the ever-so-prevalent rock operas of the time would spring readily to mind.

 
At 12:12 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

Oh, duh....Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

 

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