But no matter where the days have left you

You know what the street cafe is. Well, I do, anyway, and that's what matters. 

 

And what have you done?

Don't get carried away

Well, I haven't seen this video in a minute. Now that I'm three times as old as the first times I saw it (!), I can see that it's pretty densely packed: a post-apocalyptic Western, and/or a Mad Maxian pilgrimage tale with a state-of-the-art, probably Magnavox, plot device (that happens to have working batteries).Well, a lot of analog devices, amps and whatnot, stuff that gearheads would salivate over now. Tom and the HBs, though, seem bemused, at least until Mike finds that guitar just in time for the solo. And the climax must be when Tom pushes over the Astro Invaders video game since, after all, it's 1982. But why doesn't he shoot it?



It doesn't matter. I just like to hear this song. The creepy synths, the kind of ponderous pace, the lonesome guitar chords...they sound like dark October weekday afternoons that seemed safe and cozy but when it felt like something better -- spring, sunshine, the wisdom of age-- might be around the corner.

p.s. Heard the lyrics for years, yes, but when reading them--yowch. Kind of a terrible dude there, Tom, dude.

Well it's all right, everything'll work out fine

Today In I Needed To Hear This.

Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it's all right, if you live the life you please
Well it's all right, even if the sun don't shine
Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line

Folks get 'round in the sunshine

Everybody does, even when it only goes up as high as your eyes like it does here in November.

Then as it was, then again it will be

Is anyone else surprised when they (re)learn that Zeppelin released an album in 1975? Aren't they indelibly of 1969-72? Or, my god, in 1979? I mean, I like those songs to be sure, but they are kind of the shadow of the former selves.

This one still has the hip-hugger pants magic, in a way, and the Green World/cheeseball lyrics ("We are eagles of one nest / The nest is in our soul"). 

Today, I think it just sounds like autumn time. And looking back at paths not taken. 

Time, beckoning me

This is what you listen to when you have writer's block. Or don't know what to write, or both.

It could kind of be a hymn, like Dust in the Wind. It was in the hymnal (or, rather, binder with mimeographed pages of songs), but we never, ever got to sing it. I don't know if it was somehow officially sanctioned, or if it was sneaked in there by a fan of Kansas.

Time followed up the first single, "Games People Play," which was decidedly more prog and prone to be played in a bar while you're playing pool in the early 2000s, but never to be played during Mass (maybe confession, though).

This, though, is sweet and sad, and not so slick that it doesn't take you someplace, whether it's up in the clouds or a daydream you had in the backseat of the car in the summer of '81.