You've got something about you that I want around me

'81 must have presented me with a well-working radio because I know each and every one of these songs.

Was this now-clunky, then-spectacular alarm clock radio the source? I think it had been handed down to me by then, and I sure didn't get a boombox until a few years later. It was this beauty

I know I inherited this one and had it from high school well into the 2000s; I am intimately familiar with the feel of that SNOOZ button. Hard to push, had to bash. 

Before it served as an alarm clock in my adulthood, waking me first with Double Q, then with KLH, and then with XRT, the alarm clock radio was a day-and-night companion, telling time, connecting me to the world outside of my bedroom, making that sanctuary feel super doubly safer, especially when down-list latter-day charters by synth pioneers played. 

It's not the same, coming from the flatness of the internet. Give me the tinny speaker of the morning squawk box, sending, ethereally, a voice from another time right to me in my insomnia or sadness, dreams or waking up.

You've got something about you that I want around me

I'm a sucker for the soaring and otherworldly sounds of Gary Wright. This track is the logical advancement of what he established in "Dream Weaver" and "My Love Is Alive"-- you can hear that the equipment is more state-of-the-art than the tracks of 1975's The Dream Weaver.

Buddy of and collaborator with George Harrison, playing keys on Harrison's solo albums and pursuing a deep interest in India and spirituality with him. No surprise that relationship evolved into logging miles in Ringo's All-Starr Band.

Once in training to be a doctor, Gary assembles songs with the same kind of delicate precision that you find in a surgeon. He found his way around the early Korgs and Rolands, and even pioneered use of the keytar (see below).

And he could still get down.

Gary Wright is resoundingly under-praised, in my book.

As usual, I prefer the deep-cut, non-hit, that first reintroduction of which prompts the delightful realization, "I probably haven't heard this since it was on the radio in 198x!"