Slip Slidin' Away Album: Greatest Hits, Etc. (1977)
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes Album: Graceland (1986)
by Paul Simon

"The nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away."

Paul Simon gave us Slip Slidin' Away in this story about three different people who retreat from their passions when confronted with the vagaries of life. The song shows how we can all watch our dreams pass us by and end up like the absentee father in the third verse, kissing his son as he sleeps and then heading back home. It can seem like we are fated to do so, as "God makes his plan" and "the information's unavailable to the mortal man."

Slip Slidin' Away is repetitive, with the chorus at the beginning and then showing up again four more times. Speaking with SongTalk, Simon explained that this was a flaw in the song. "The last verse is a powerful one, but the chorus, it keeps coming back to the chorus," he said. "You know what that chorus is going to say. I always felt it should be shorter, but I didn't know which verses to take out. Either the last verse or the father/child verse. But they all seemed like they had to be in there, so I left it. But I always felt that the record and the song stayed on a plateau. It didn't build."
This was one of two new songs released on Simon's Greatest Hits, Etc. album. It was released as a single backed with the other new song "Stranded in a Limousine."

The album Greatest Hits, Etc. was a turning point in Simon's relationship with Columbia Records, which barely promoted it. It peaked at #18 in the US, a surprising flop for Simon. Clive Davis, who championed Simon at the label, had left, and the new regime was more enamored with artists like Billy Joel and Paul McCartney. Simon and the new boss, Walter Yetnikoff, didn't get along, and Simon signed a deal with Warner Brothers.

Backup vocals on Slip Slidin' Away are by The Oak Ridge Boys.

Paul Simon traveled to South Africa in 1985 and recorded with various local musicians, gathering tracks that would be used on the Graceland album. While he was there, he met with the leader of a vocal group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and he flew them to London to record the song "Homeless." Simon and the group bonded at these sessions, and when Paul was finishing the album in New York, he brought them in to back him on his Saturday Night Live appearance on May 10, 1986. Also in town for the show were some of the musicians he recorded with in South Africa, including guitarist Ray Phiri, bass player Bakithi Kumalo and drummer Isaac Mtshali. This was quite an experience for these musicians, who lived under the racist Apartheid rule in their home country. Getting picked up in limos driven by white men was a culture shock. When they asked about visiting Central Park, Simon had to explain that they didn't need a permit - they could just walk in.

The album was originally scheduled for release that spring, but was pushed back to August. Simon figured, "Well, we're all here, text limit

Compilation of the acts of the wizard...
Content and Research Provided by:
Wim/
https://rumble.com/user/Godgevlamste

Synchromysticism.
The greatest Hollywood theory ever told.
Home of Apophenia Productions.
https://www.youtube.com/@UCJ-GqOVcDG0..
.

Shaking My Head Productions
@shakingmyheadproductions

and random mixology and secret recipe additions by me Franklyn Jones, The Prince of Pensacola & The Lord of LeJeune.

Compilation of the acts of the wizard...
Content and Research Provided by:
Wim/
https://rumble.com/user/Godgevlamste

Synchromysticism.
The greatest Hollywood theory ever told.
Home of Apophenia Productions.
https://www.youtube.com/@UCJ-GqOVcDG0..
.

Shaking My Head Productions
@shakingmyheadproductions

and random mixology and secret recipe additions by me Franklyn Jones, The Prince of Pensacola & The Lord of LeJeune.

Loser Album: Mellow Gold (1994)
Devil's Haircut Album: Odelay (1996)
by Beck

The chorus of "Soy un perdedor" is Spanish for "I'm a loser." Beck grew up in a Latin section of Los Angeles and most of his schoolmates were of Mexican descent.

"Loser" is one of the most bizarre songs ever to become a hit. A sample of the lyrics:

Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose
Kill the headlights and put it in neutral

Beck moved to New York at 18, then went back to Los Angeles a year or so later, in 1990. He started making up outlandish raps both to amuse his friends and to check the pulse of the crowds at his bar and coffeehouse gigs where most people wouldn't pay attention. He signed to the independent Bong Load Records in 1991, which connected him with Karl Stephenson, a producer who had done work with the Geto Boys. At Stephenson's house, they wrote and recorded "Loser" in a few hours; Beck hit on the title and chorus after doing some raps and exclaiming, "I'm the worst rapper in the world - I'm just a loser!"

Bong Load didn't release the song until 1993, by which time Beck had released some singles, including one called "MTV Makes Me Wanna Smoke Crack." The song earned airplay on college radio and on some of the more adventurous alternative stations, including KNDD in Seattle, and the major labels came calling. Beck signed with Geffen Records in an unusual deal that let him issue his wares on indie labels as well, including Bong Load. It was far from the highest offer, but gave him the creative freedom he was after. Geffen put him on their alternative imprint, DGC, and released "Loser" in early 1994. With their promotional push, the song took off, climbing to #10 in the US in April. It ended up the biggest hit in Beck's highly eclectic discography.

The sample of "I'm a driver, I'm a winner, Things are gonna change soon, I can feel it," comes from an independent film called Kill the Moonlight, directed by Beck's friend, Steve Hanft. Beck did some songs for the film, which wasn't released until 1994, a year after song was issued with the sample. Hanft directed the video for "Loser."

The music video is as disjointed as the lyric, with a stop-motion coffin, graveyard aerobics, and shirtless acoustic guitarist. At the beginning of the video, Beck is wearing a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet that had to be blurred out for legal reasons. Beck was known to respond to request for "Loser" at concerts by putting on the helmet, playing the song from cassette on a boombox, and dancing around the stage.

Beck had utter disdain for MTV (did we mention he recorded a song called "MTV Makes Me Wanna Smoke Crack"), but they loved him, putting the video in hot rotation.

The media narrative of this song was that it's an anti-establishment slacker anthem emblematic of Generation X ennui. Beck fielded questions on the topic at most interviews. He told The Guardian in 1996: "That sort of slacker idea, or the goofy hip-hop guy, I just think it's silly, text limit

About Time
Documentary 1962
by Bell System Labs

Planet Q has just made a clock, but can't figure out what time is. Lucky for them Peacock Award Winning Professor Dr. Frank Baxter knows a lot about time and leads us into a fantastic discussion about time itself. A great documentary on the mystery and function of time in our lives. It is a cosmic discussion that includes time, space and the whole universe! The documentary ABOUT TIME was produced by Bell Labs in 1962 and was a short in some movie theaters in the USA. With live action and animation.

This film "About Time" was one of the “Bell System Science Series”, which consisted of nine educational television specials made for the AT&T Corporation and originally broadcast on TV from 1956 to 1964. This episode, hosted by Dr. Frank Baxter, focuses on the properties of time and how we track it. The screenplay was written by Richard Hobson, Nancy Pitt, and Leo Salkin. It was directed by Owen Crump. Phil Monroe directed the animations. The film starred Richard Deacon and Les Tremayne and included various consultants including famed physicist Dr. Richard Feynman. The film opens with the King's Assistant, time expert Dr. Frank Baxter, and King talking to each other.

In this one, we take an imaginary visit to the "Planet Q" where the inhabitants are just like we humans and hold court with a king on his throne. The "plot" involves setting the "royal" clock and needing a "time" to start with. Conveniently, Frank Baxter is available with an observatory peeping out to Earth and is able to give a detailed description of what "time" is.

Subjects covered include a history of clocks starting with sticks-in-the-ground, sun dials, calendars, Galileo's first use of the pendulum in 1583, the use of quartz crystals and, in the 20th century, atomic energy for modern clocks. The seasons are briefly studied, along with how plants, snowshoe hares and hamsters use their own "clocks". Uranium properties aid paleontologists in "dating" fossils and studying the earth's age.

The best segments involve Einstein and his relativity principle. Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series in 1979-80 covered similar material in live-action (and considerably more detail), but the cartoon footage gets the point across quite well. Two twin brothers... one an astronaut traveling the speed of light and the other staying on Earth age 60 years differently, because time is different in outer space with different "laws" in effect.

Like all of the programs, there is a great finish. This time, the Big Bang theory is presented with delightful slushy orchestration and the all-too-familiar passage is borrowed from Ecclesiastes (later done by the Byrds in song). It is an appropriate ending to the very last Bell Science special (with Baxter starring), since the Warner-produced specials didn't delve into scripture like the earlier Frank Capra productions (such as OUR MR. SUN and HEMO THE MAGNIFICENT).

Telephone Line Album: A New World Record (1976)
Last Train To London Album: Discovery (1979)
by Electric Light Orchestra

"Telephone Line" was released in May 1977 through Jet Records and United Artists Records as part of the album A New World Record. It was commercially successful, topping the charts of Canada and New Zealand and entering the top 10 in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The ballad is track two on their 1976 album, A New World Record, and was the final single to be released from the album until September 2006, when "Surrender" was released from the expanded reissue of the album. It became their biggest single success in the US and was their first UK gold award for a single.

The lyrics are about a man listening to the ringing on his telephone waiting and hoping for a girl to answer his call and imagining what he would say if she answers.

With ELO's continuing success in America it seemed obvious to frontman Jeff Lynne to use an American ring tone during the song. Lynne explained:

To get the sound on the beginning, you know, the American telephone sound, we phoned from England to America to a number that we know nobody would be at, to just listen to it for a while. On the Moog, we recreated the sound exactly by tuning the oscillators to the same notes as the ringing of the phone.

The song charted in the Top Ten in both the UK and the US, peaking at number 8 in the UK and number 7 in the US. It was on the Hot 100 for 23 weeks, nearly a full month longer on that chart than any other ELO song. Billboard ranked it as the No. 15 song of 1977. In 1977, the song reached number 1 in New Zealand and Canada. "Telephone Line" and Meri Wilson's "Telephone Man" were back-to-back on Hot 100's top 40 for two non-consecutive weeks in the summer of 1977.

As was the norm, many ELO singles were issued in different colours, but the US version of the single of Telephone Line was the only green single ELO issued. The US single also was shortened to 3:56 with an early fade. It became the band's first single to achieve Gold sales figures.

"Telephone Line" is the theme song of the 1977 film Joyride starring Desi Arnaz Jr., Robert Carradine, Melanie Griffith, and Anne Lockhart, directed by Joseph Ruben.

Jeff Lynne re-recorded Telephone Line in his own home studio. It was released in a compilation album with other re-recorded ELO songs, under the ELO name.

In 2012, as part of the concert from his home studio, Live From Bungalow Palace, Lynne performed an acoustic version of Telephone Line with longtime ELO pianist Richard Tandy.

"Last Train to London" is the fifth track from their album Discovery recorded at Musicland Studios, Munich, West Germany

The song was released in 1979 in the UK as a double A-side single with "Confusion". It peaked at number 8 in the UK Singles Chart. However, in the US the two songs charted separately, with "Confusion" in late 1979 followed by "Last Train to London" in early 1980. It peaked at number 39

From The Beginning Album: Trilogy (1972)
Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 2 Album: Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
by Emerson Lake & Palmer

ELP's formula for successful albums seemed to be a concept covering several songs - a beautiful acoustic number by Greg Lake, and one comedy song per album. For Trilogy, "From the Beginning" was Greg Lake's beautiful acoustic number that showed his acoustic guitar skills were right up there with his bass talents.

From The Beginning is a heartfelt song of devotion, Lake claims that the inspiration for the song has left his memory. Says Lake: "Very often lyrics simply come about simply because of the way one feels at a moment in time. There is no earth moving moment of divine inspiration or grand plan and I'm sure that was the case with this song. Although very young at the time I sometimes had moments of reflection and maybe also perhaps a feeling that I could be a better person, I think this was just one of those."

Karn Evil 9 is ELP's most popular song from their most popular album. The song is most commonly interpreted as ELP's take on a shortened history of the world into a futuristic tale. The First Impression begins on the "Cold and misty morning" of the Earth's birth, through the ice age ("Where the seeds have withered, silent faces in the cold"), and to man's growing lust for money ("Now their faces captured in the lenses of the jackals for gold"), which leads to various wars. Afterwards, the world is described as a carnival, wherein various elements of humanity are reduced to circus sideshows ("A bomb inside a car," "Pull Jesus from a hat"), representing the human race's growing selfishness and indifference toward others. Even human misery is described as a "specialty" in the "show."

The second part of the First Impression focuses on the growing artificialization of the world, describing something as natural as "A real blade of grass" as some bizarre circus attraction. Despite the fact that the world is becoming more and more consumed by artificiality and given control to computers (see Third Impression), the human race insists that it is still in control, as it created all that the "Carnival" encompasses ("We would like it to be known the exhibits that were shown were exclusively our own.").

The Second Impression is an instrumental piece (mostly a piano solo), symbolizing the blissful ignorance of humanity towards the impending danger of the conquest of the computers, which culminates in the Third Impression. At this point, the "machines" have concluded their superiority to humanity and begin to take on mankind's necessity to prove their own superiority. The computers are represented by heavily distorted vocals, while the voice of the all-representative "Man" is clean and without effect. The computers finally wage a violent conquest of the Earth. Mankind is shocked that its own creation is fighting back against him ("Walls that no man thought would fall") and is unprepared for the conflict. Finally t

Let There Be Rock Album: Southern Rock Opera (2001)
Gravity's Gone Album: A Blessing and a Curse (2006)
The Buford Stick Album: The Dirty South (2008)
by Drive By Truckers

Southern Rock Opera is a double concept album tracing the rise and fall of a mythical guitar hero released the day after 9/11. It is loosely based on the exploits of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the wider mythology of the American South. This song is a guitar charged account of a teenhood spent drinking, drugging and getting arrested plus going to see rock and roll bands.

Vocalist and co-writer Patterson Hood said: "Let There Be Rock" was about "how partying and going to arena rock shows kept me from going off the deep end in High School."

This was one of three songs that Patterson Hood wrote for Southern Rock Opera on the same day. (He also penned "Wallace" and "Angels and Fuselage.")

Guitarist and co-songwriter Mike Cooley told Uncut:

"'Let There Be Rock' is a mostly fictional story, but it captures a certain time in your life. And that was something that was really important to us. Everything about it - feeling freedom for the first time and how rock and roll concerts played into that, hearing the crowd swell, flirting with disaster, being the biggest threat to yourself that you'll ever be in your life. And maybe living through it, or maybe not."

The song features the sound of a crowd at a gig. Patterson Hood told Uncut: "I decided that 'Let There Be Rock' needed to be the breakthrough '70s hit from this fake band, Betamax Guillotine, so it had to sound like one. I've always loved the applause on 'Bennie And The Jets' and wanted something like that on this song. So when we were mixing the record, I bought in my vinyl copy of Cheap Trick at Budokan and lifted two different crowd swells. The really big one kicks in when the guitars get going."

The Drive-by Truckers have always harbored a bit of Replacements envy, particularly Patterson Hood. But “Gravity’s Gone,” the ultimate anthem to the down and out, actually comes from Mike Cooley. A wry, off-the-cuff meditation on life’s smirking injustice, it can be summarized by the wistful last lines: “What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard.”

The melancholy twang is tart, like something once sweet that’s soured—hope, perhaps? Cooley begins the song in a fog of self-reflection, wondering “about a reason for the things I told her/ She woke up sunny-side down/ and I was still thinking I was too proud to flip her over.” It’s followed by a terrific observation on compensation of sorts: “Cocaine rich comes quick/ That’s why the small dicks have it all.”

That would be enough to make it a great song, even without the wonderful chorus about falling and never hitting bottom. The second stanza, though, concludes with bits of advice worthy of Mary Schmich’s famous 1997 column, “Wear Sunscreen,” which Baz Luhrman turned into a hit single two years later.

“You’ll never lose your mind, as long as your heart always remind

Diary Of A Madman Album: Diary of a Madman (1981)
Crazy Train Album: Blizzard of Ozz (1980)
by Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy's bass player Bob Daisley wrote Diary Of A Madman. Said Daisley: "I really wrote that one about myself. When I was 16 I had my first nervous breakdown and it really f---ed me up. I was a sensitive kid and I have always been a sensitive person. I suppose you have to be sensitive being in the arts. I wrote the words about myself. Quite often we have problems and we are our own worst enemies and that is why 'Enemies fill up the pages one by one in the diary. Are they me?' I am my own worst enemy.

The other thing was that Randy [Rhoads] had the rough idea for the song 'Diary of a Madman' and I came up with title. I wrote all of the lyrics as well on the album. Ozzy would come and go from rehearsals. One day he came in and we played him 'Diary of a Madman' and because it had funny timing he couldn't get his head around. He said, 'Who the f--k do you think I am? Frank Zappa!' We said, 'You sing in this part but you don't sing here. This timing goes like this etc.' He started to like it when he got his head around but at first he was like, 'This is not for me'."

The title came from a 1963 movie of the same name starring Vincent Price.

Through a bit of revisionist history, Diary of a Madman became Ozzy Osbourne's second solo album. After leaving Black Sabbath in 1978, he formed a new band with Bob Daisley, Randy Rhoads and Lee Kerslake called the Blizzard of Ozz, which ended up being billed as an Ozzy solo project after the album was released showing just Osbourne on the cover and his name in big letters.

In an interview with Bob Daisley, he explained that this song was conceived before they had the title for the album, and it made a perfect fit. Said Daisley: "I thought it would be a good title for an Ozzy Osbourne album because he's got the reputation of being one of the madmen of rock and roll."

The little boy on the album cover is Ozzy's son Louis from his first marriage.

In Crazy Train, Ozzy asks when we can all learn to love in a world gone mad. Ozzy wrote the song with guitarist Randy Rhoads and bass player Bob Daisley. In an interview with Daisley, he explained how it came together:

"Randy had the basic riff, the signature riff. Then we worked on music together. He needed something to solo on so I came up with a chord pattern and the section for him to solo over.

Before it was called 'Crazy Train,' before we even had a title, Randy and I were working on the music. He had his effects pedals, and coming through his amp was a weird kind of chugging sound. It was a phase-y kind of psychedelic effect, this chugging sound that was coming through his amp from his effects pedal.

Randy was into trains - he used to collect model trains and so did I. I've always been a train buff and so was Randy. So I said, 'Randy, that sounds like a train. But it sounds nuts.' And I said, 'A crazy train.'

Well, that's when the title first text limit

Brandy You're A Fine Girl Album: Looking Glass (1972) Track 2
Golden Rainbow side 1 Track 4
Don't It Make You Feel Good side 2 Track 1 (5th overall)
by Looking Glass

The four members of Looking Glass are alumni of Rutgers University, and the Spring 2009 Rutgers alumni magazine carried an article about Brandy You're A Fine Girl and the band itself. The pertinent part reads:

"The band recorded the song seven times before they got it right. 'Brandy' - based on the name of (lead singer) Elliot Lurie's high school sweetheart 'Randy' - tells the story of a musician torn between his love for a life at sea and his love for a barmaid. Released as the B-side of 'Don't It Make You Feel Good,' the song was overlooked, as was the A-side, for that matter, until Harv Moore, a Washington DC disc jockey took it up as a personal cause. After years of playing covers and their originals at frat parties and bars in the New Brunswick area, Looking Glass was signed to Epic Records by the legendary Clive Davis.

The band, appearing on Dick Clark's American Bandstand and at Carnegie Hall, never came close to matching 'Brandy's' success. And by 1973, Lurie had left for a solo career. He was replaced, but the band soon fell apart. In 1995, Looking Glass reunited to perform 'Brandy' and 'Jimmie loves Mary-Anne' at a Madison Square Garden concert. in 2000, 'Brandy' was part of the sound track for the film Charlie's Angels, for which band members and Peter Sweval's estate each received a royalty check of $30K (Sweval died of AIDS in 1992).

The members of the band also receive the modest sum of $4K each year for the general use of the song. Says former drummer Jeff Grob, wistfully: 'If only liquor commercials were allowed on TV.

Where the former band members are today: Larry Gonsky RC'70 (keyboards) teaches music in the Morristown school district; Jeff Grob CC'85 (drums) after playing with the hard-rock band Starz, returned to school and earned his landscape architecture degree. He works for Stantec, which contributed to the redesign of Route 18. He still plays locally with Richie Ranno's All Stars; Elliot Lurie RC'70 (lead guitar) manages actors and recording artists, including Corbin Bleu of High School Musical fame, in Los Angeles. He worked as an independent music film supervisor and executive vice president of music at 20th Century Fox; Pieter Sweval RC'70 (bass) played with Starz and the disco band Skatt Bros before dying of AIDS in 192. Royalties are donated by Sweval's family to AIDS research."

The band was signed by Clive Davis, a famous record executive who has nurtured the careers of many successful artists, including Santana, Billy Joel and Whitney Houston. Davis has a knack for knowing a hit song when he hears one, but he got this one wrong, releasing it as the B-side of their song "Don't It Make You Feel Good." Harv Moore, a disc jockey in Washington DC, flipped the record and played "Brandy" instead. It became very popular in the DC area, and quickly spread

The Spirit Of Radio Track 1
Red Barchetta Track 2 Album: Exit... Stage Left (1981)
by Rush

Exit... Stage Left is the second live album by the Canadian rock band Rush, released as a double album in October 1981 by Anthem Records. After touring in support of their eighth studio album Moving Pictures (1981), the band gathered recordings made over the previous two years and constructed a live release from them with producer Terry Brown. The album features recordings from June 1980 on their Permanent Waves (1980) tour, and from March 1981 on their Moving Pictures tour.

The album received a mostly positive reception from music critics and reached number 6 in the United Kingdom, 7 in Canada, and 10 in the United States. It was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for selling one million copies in the USA. A same-titled home video was released in 1982 that documents the band on the Moving Pictures tour. Exit... Stage Left was voted the ninth best live album of all time by Classic Rock magazine in 2004.

After the 1981 tour, the band retreated to Le Studio in Morin Heights in Quebec, Canada to edit and mix the recordings they had made on the two tours, which Neil Peart noted totaled over 50 reels of two-inch tape. The band went through the material to find the best performances for inclusion for a live album. Whenever they found a technical fault or a wrong note affecting an otherwise acceptable performance, they replaced it using material from other shows in their collection of tapes. In 1993, Geddy Lee revealed that the band had to add in new sections in the studio to correct passages with out-of-tune guitars.[8] None of the individual band members is credited with the album's production; the duty fell to their longtime producer, Terry Brown. During the production, Rush wrote and recorded "Subdivisions", a new song that would be released on their following studio album, Signals.

Upon the album's completion, Peart said the group were happier with Exit... Stage Left than with their first live album All the World's a Stage, noting that the latter suffered from uneven sound quality. In subsequent years however, Lee developed a more critical view of Exit... Stage Left, noting that the group tried to make it sound "too perfect" in part by reducing the levels of audience noise, while Alex Lifeson for his part thought the album sounded too clean and not as raw as All the World's a Stage, and as a consequence the band aimed to reach a "middle ground" between the two with A Show of Hands, Rush's third live release. Nevertheless, the album remains a fan favorite.

The title comes from the catchphrase of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Snagglepuss. The term "stage left" is a stage direction used in blocking to identify the left side of a theater from the point of view of the performer, as opposed to the point of view of the audience.

The whole title came from a character in an American cartoon called Snagglepuss. text limit

The Times They Are A-changin Album: The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)
Hurricane Album: Greatest Hits Volume 3 (1975)
Knockin' On Heavens Door Album: Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid Soundtrack (1973)
by Bob Dylan

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" became an anthem for frustrated youth. It summed up the anti-establishment feelings of people who would later be known as hippies. Many of the lyrics are based on the Civil Rights movement in the US.

In the liner notes of the album Biograph, Dylan wrote of The Times They Are A-changin: "I wanted to write a big song, some kind of theme song, with short, concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. This is definitely a song with a purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and who I wanted to say it to."

Dylan recorded The Times They Are A-changin in October 1963. He first performed the song at a Carnegie Hall concert on October 26 that year, using it as his opening number.

On November 22, 1963, 27 days after the Carnegie Hall performance United States president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which made this song even more TAVISTOCK TIMELY. This also presented a public quandary for Dylan, who had to decide if he would keep playing the song; he found it odd when audiences would erupt in applause after hearing it, and wondered exactly what they were clapping for... so the story goes from the gatekeepers.

Dylan kept the song in his sets. It was issued on the album of the same name on January 13, 1964.

Dylan covered the Carter Family Song "Wayworn Traveler," writing his own words to the melody and named it "Paths Of Victory". This recording is featured on "Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3". After writing that song, he re-wrote the words again, changed the time signature to 3/4, and created The Times They Are A-changin, one of his most famous songs ever.

This was released as a single in the UK in 1965 before Dylan went there to tour. It became his first hit in that territory, climbing to #9 on April 21. British listeners liked what they heard from Dylan and made a run on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (released in 1963), sending it to #1 on April 11. This marked the first time in two years that an album by a group other that The Beatles or Rolling Stones was #1 in the UK.

Dylan allowed The Times They Are A-changin to be used in commercials for accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand in the '90s. In 1996, he also licensed it for commercial use by the Bank of Montreal.

Handwritten lyrics to four verses of The Times They Are A-changin jotted on a scrap of paper by Dylan were sold for $422,500 at a December 10, 2010 sale. Hedge fund manager and contemporary art collector Adam Sender placed the winning bid by phone to Sothebys in New York.

The Times They Are A-changin appears on the official soundtrack of the 2009 movie Watchmen. A cover of Dylan's "Desolation Row" by My Chemical Romance also appears on the soundtrack.

Simon & Garfunkel covered The Times They Are A-changin on their fi

All I Can Do Is Write About It Album: Gimme Back My Bullets (1976)
by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Miss Columbia, is a SINGLE unwed female national personification of the United States... pawned out by her creepy Uncle Sam...

Columbia was also a historical name applied to the Americas and to the New World. The association has given rise to the names of many American places, objects, institutions and companies, including the District of Columbia; Columbia, South Carolina the State Capital; Columbia University; "Hail, Columbia"; Columbia Rediviva; and the Columbia River. Images of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, erected in 1886) largely displaced personified Columbia as the female symbol of the United States by around 1920, although Lady Liberty was seen as an aspect of Columbia. Columbia's most prominent display in the 21st Century is as part of the logo of the Hollywood film studio Columbia Pictures.

Columbia is a Neo-Latin toponym, in use since the 1730s with reference to the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. It originated from the name of the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus and from the Latin ending -ia, common in the Latin names of countries (paralleling Britannia, Gallia, Zealandia, and others).

Massachusetts Chief Justice Samuel Sewall used the name "Columbina" for the New World in 1697. The name "Columbia" for America first appeared in 1738 in the weekly publication of the debates of Parliament in Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput and fictitious names were used for most individuals and place names found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names and some few were taken directly from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels while a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from Eboracum, the Roman name for York) and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".

Lynyrd Skynyrd were taking a stand against Governor Wallace and his regime. Ronnie said in the same interview where he says that they sing ” Boo boo boo” that he did not like Wallace's views. Ronnie said the press did not pic up on the ” Boo boo boo” That's why it became controversial. This song is not about race, but has been about as misunderstood as ” Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen which was NOT a patriotic song.

"I wrote that song because the way things are goin on in todays time, I just know one day they are gonna build a holiday inn in the middle of the Everglades and what I'm basically sayin' is I don't wanna see it! That's why I say lord take me and mine before that comes."

All I Can Do Is Write About It
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Well, this life that I live, took me everywhere
There ain't no -text limit

Luxury Album: It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (1974) Side 2 Track 6
Fingerprint File Side 2 Track 10
Short and Curlies Side 2 Track 9
by the Rolling Stones

Work began on It's Only Rock 'n Roll following the Rolling Stones' autumn 1973 European tour. Production began in November at Munich, Germany's Musicland Studios. According to guitarist Keith Richards, "We were really hot (off the road) and ready just to play some new material." The recording sessions were attended by Belgian painter Guy Peellaert, who Mick Jagger invited to do the album cover after seeing his work in the book Rock Dreams, which featured illustrations of various rock musicians such as the Rolling Stones. Peellaert eventually painted the band as "rock deities", descending a temple staircase, surrounded by young girls and women worshiping them in Grecian clothing. The cover bears a very strong resemblance to Henri Gervex's painting, The Coronation of Nicolas II (1896). The artist refused to sign a deal of exclusivity, and in 1974 provided the album art for David Bowie's Diamond Dogs.

The album was at first developed as a half-live, half-studio production with one side of the album featuring live performances from the Stones' European tour while the other side was to be composed of newly recorded cover versions of the band's favourite R&B songs. Covers recorded included a take of Dobie Gray's "Drift Away", Jimmy Reed's "Shame Shame Shame", and the Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud to Beg". Soon the band began working off riffs by Richards and new ideas by Mick Jagger and the original concept was scrapped in favour of an album with all-new material. The cover of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" was the only recording to make the cut, while the "Drift Away" cover is a popular bootleg.[6]

It's Only Rock 'n Roll marked the Stones' first effort in the producer's chair since Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the first for Jagger and Richards under their pseudonym "The Glimmer Twins". On the choice to produce, Richards said at the time:

"I think we'd come to a point with Jimmy (Miller) where the contribution level had dropped because it'd got to be a habit, a way of life, for Jimmy to do one Stones album a year. He'd got over the initial sort of excitement which you can feel on Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. Also, Mick and I felt that we wanted to try and do it ourselves because we really felt we knew much more about techniques and recording and had our own ideas of how we wanted things to go. Goats Head Soup hadn't turned out as we wanted to – not blaming Jimmy or anything like that... But it was obvious that it was time for a change in that particular part of the process of making records."[2]

Starting with this release, all future Rolling Stones albums would either be produced by themselves or in collaboration with an outside producer.

Most of the album's backing tracks were recorded first at Musicland; solo vocals were recorded later by Jagger, about whom Richards would say, text limit

Burnin For You Album: Fire Of Unknown Origin (1981)
Don't Fear The Reaper Album: Agents of Fortune (1976)
by Blue Öyster Cult

Lead guitarist Don "Buck Dharma" Roeser wrote Burnin For You with Richard Meltzer, a rock writer who often contributed lyrics to the band. Dharma initially planned to release this song on his solo album, Flat Out, but was later convinced to include it on Blue Öyster Cult's Fire Of Unknown Origin. Dharma sang lead, as he did on many of BÖC's songs.

In an interview with Dharma, he said: "'Burnin' for You' is a Richard Meltzer lyric that probably has the most sincere sentiment from my view. I wrote the music to that, because I thought I could do a good job... and I guess I did."
When Richard Meltzer wrote the lyrics, he titled the song "Burn Out The Night," a reference to an evening of rock and roll. Blue Öyster Cult had a "band house" where their band members and associates (including their manager, Sandy Pearlman) would bring in song ideas and lyrics.

Joe Bouchard, who was their bass player at the time, told the metal magazine Chips & Beer that he and Buck Dharma came across Meltzer's lyrics at the same time, and each wrote their own song around it. Dharma's version, with the title changed to "Burnin' For You," was the one that got recorded.

Along with Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult was one of the first heavy metal bands. They issued their first album in 1972 and grew a modest following before scoring a hit with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" (also written by Buck Dharma) from their 1976 album Agents of Fortune, which hit #12 and became embedded on rock playlists.

Their next (and last) Top 40 hit came with "Burnin' For You," which was a #1 hit on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart.
In the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, frontman Eric Bloom tells the story of the "Burnin' For You" video: "We went out to California, and our management found a video company, and we did two videos in 24 hours - 'Burnin' For You' and 'Joan Crawford.' MTV wouldn't show the 'Joan Crawford' video, because there was something about it that was too racy for them. But 'Burnin' For You' got a ton of airplay on MTV in 1981 and 1982. We made it in the storm drains of LA. If anyone has seen the movie about giant ants, called Them!, with James Whitmore, it was filmed in the same place." Later he adds: "We thought the car on fire was very Hollywood, very cool. They had to have a Hollywood film/pyro guy there, who was licensed to burn s--t up. He had propane tanks, and he had to have a hunk of car to burn."

These videos were directed by Richard Casey, who directed the 1985 movie Horror House on Highway Five.
The first eight lines of this song all contain the word "home," which makes up the first verse:

Home in the valley
Home in the city
Home isn't pretty
Ain't no home for me

Home in the darkness
Home on the highway
Home isn't my way
Home will never be

Later, the theme switches to "time," text limit

1979 Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
Tonight Tonight Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
Ava Adore Album: Adore (1998)
Bullet with Butterfly Wings Album: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)
by The Smashing Pumpkins

In 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA. The ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline. As their car approaches the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to be unraveling ever faster—as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.

The Smashing Pumpkins 1979, Tonight Tonight, Ava Adore, Bullet with Butterfly Wings

1979 contains the same numbers as 1997 where the electric state takes place.

Lead singer Billy Corgan wrote "1979" about making the transition out of youth and into adulthood. He remembered being in high school and having adult responsibilities like a car and job, but still being very much a youth and dependent on his parents.

Corgan chose 1979 for the title because it rhymed with many of the words he wanted to use in the lyrics.

Corgan (from VH1 Storytellers): "Sometimes, when I write a song, I see a picture in my head. For some reason, it's of the obscure memory I have." The memory that goes with 1979 is from when he was around 18 years old. He was driving down a road near his home on a rainy night, and was waiting at a traffic light. He says that the picture "emotionally connotes a feeling of waiting for something to happen, and not being quite there yet, but it's just around the corner."

1979 was the last song written for Mellon Collie. Corgan told the producer that he thought it had a lot of potential, so the producer gave Corgan 24 hours to make it work, or else it wouldn't be on the album. He went home that night and came up with the lyrics, and they recorded it the next day.

Corgan had a version of 1979 written long before it was released, but he didn't think it fit the mood of any of their previous albums.

The video for 1979 took three days to shoot and included a scene where a bunch of kids are at a party, and Smashing Pumpkins are the house band. The original tape of this scene was lost after a crew member forgot that had placed it on top of his car and drove away. A new video was cobbled together with unused footage, plus new footage shot by the group. The production assistant who drove off without the tapes was sentenced to stand in the city center with a sandwich board that said: "Lost Tapes, reward for return" on it.

1979 was nominated for two Grammys - Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance.

Billy Corgan once joked, "We wrote this song (1979) for Michael Jackson, but found he couldn't do the Moonwalk to it."

The husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed the video. The supermarket mayhem in the clip is textlimit

Welcome to My Nightmare Album: Welcome To My Nightmare (1975)
Public Animal #9 Album: School's Out (1972)
Alma Mater Album: School's Out (1972)
Grande Finale Album: School's Out (1972)
by Alice Cooper

Simon Stålenhag (born 20 January 1984) is a Swedish artist, musician, and designer specialising in retro-futuristic digital images focused on nostalgic Swedish countryside alternate history environments. The settings of his artwork have formed the basis for the 2020 Amazon television drama series Tales from the Loop as well as the upcoming film The Electric State.

Most of Stålenhag's artwork was initially available online, before later being released for sale as prints. Since then, it has been turned into two narrative art books: Tales from the Loop (Swedish Ur Varselklotet) in 2014 and Things from the Flood (Swedish Flodskörden) in 2016. Both focus on the construction of a supermassive particle accelerator called the Loop.

Stålenhag grew up in a rural environment near Stockholm, and began illustrating local landscapes at a young age. He was inspired by different artists, including Lars Jonsson. Stålenhag experimented with science fiction artwork after discovering concept artists such as Ralph McQuarrie and Syd Mead; initially, this body of work was done as a side project, without any planning behind it. Thematically, his work often combines his childhood with themes from sci-fi movies, resulting in a stereotypical Swedish landscape with a neofuturistic bent. According to Stålenhag, this focus originates from his perceived lack of connection with adulthood, with the science fiction elements being added in part to draw audience attention and partly to influence the work's mood. These ideas result in a body of work that can feature giant robots and megastructures alongside regular Swedish items like Volvo and Saab cars.

As his work has evolved, Stålenhag has created a backstory for it, focused around a governmental underground facility. In parallel with the real-life decline of the Swedish welfare state, large machines slowly fail, and the eventual result of this remains a mystery. In a 2013 interview with The Verge, Stålenhag said, "The only difference in the world of my art and our world is that ... ever since the early 20th century, attitudes and budgets were much more in favour of science and technology."

Outside of his usual canon, Stålenhag also drew 28 pictures of dinosaurs for the Swedish Museum of Natural History's prehistoric exhibits after he rediscovered his childhood interest in the creatures, and contacted the museum to see if he could do anything. In 2016, he followed this with pictures of hypothetical results of a rising ocean under climate change for Stockholm University's Resilience Centre. He also did some promotional artwork for the sci-fi video game No Man's Sky.

Stålenhag uses a Wacom tablet and computer for his work, which is designed to resemble oil painting. Initially, he attempted to use various physical mediatextlimit

Never Let Me Down Again Album: Music For The Masses (1987)
Personal Jesus Album: Violator (1989)
by Depeche Mode

Written by Martin Gore with lead vocals by Dave Gahan, "Never Let Me Down Again" is one of the most ambiguous Depeche Mode songs. It is often believed to be about drugs, which offer both comfort and excitement to the singer. When Gahan sings, "We're flying high, we're watching the world pass us by," that indicates getting high on drugs, but the song could also have a much more literal meaning about taking an airplane ride with a friend.

It gets even more confusing near the end of the song, with the lines:

Promises me I'm safe as houses
As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers

Someone or something is making sure he knows his place.

Another possibility is that the song is about gay sex. Leaving it open for interpretation was likely Gore's intention.

The band brought in Anton Corbijn to do the visuals for the Music For The Masses album, including the photos and the videos. For this song, he put together an 8-minute black-and-white clip for the 12-inch single version, which was cut down to 4:23 for the single version. The video, which was included on the Depeche Mode compilation Strange, didn't shed any light on the meaning of the song, as we see a series of rather disjointed images, including a pair of shoes that walk themselves.

The song enjoyed a streaming boost in the US after it was included in the HBO series The Last Of Us. It plays on the radio in the final scene of the show's pilot episode on January 15, 2023.

Craig Mazin, the co-creator of the series, selected the song because of its combination of cheerful sounds and gloomy lyrics. He believed the title of the song relates to the relationship between the two main protagonists, Joel and Ellie.

Dave Gahan watched the Last Of Us pilot episode in bed with his wife. "I was falling asleep and the show came on and I was watching it a bit," he recalled to BBC Radio 2's Gary Davies. "And then I fell asleep. And then suddenly in my dream, I could hear the beginning of Never Let Me Down and I sat up and like a boxer, hearing the bell, like going to go in and fight or something. And I heard it. And so I watched that scene and I liked it as well because the song represents that particular time in music. It represents trouble, it means trouble was coming. That was the code and I thought, 'This is perfect for that.'"

Personal Jesus was inspired by Priscilla Presley's book Elvis And Me, where she described their relationship. Martin Gore of Depeche Mode said: "It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It's about how Elvis was her man and her mentor and how often that happens in love relationships - how everybody's heart is like a god in some way, and that's not a very balanced view of someone, is it?"

Johnny Cash did a stripped-down version of Personal Jesus on his 2002 album American IV, The Man Comes Around. Martin Gore text limit

No Surprises Album: OK Computer (1997)
Karma Police Album: OK Computer (1997)
Creep Album: Pablo Honey (1992)
by Radiohead

All art is not exclusively Simon Stålenhag, but all art is Stålenhagish. It's what I tied the room togeather with.

Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke: "I spent a lot of time trying not to do voices like mine. The voices on 'Karma Police,' 'Paranoid Android' and 'Climbing up the Walls' are all different personas. No Surprises is someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't."

Bassist Colin Greenwood: "'No Surprises' is our 'stadium-friendly' song. The idea was: First frighten everyone with Climbing Up The Walls and then comfort them again with a Pop song with a chorus that sounds like a lullaby."

Thom Yorke introduced the rest of the band to this song in their dressing room in Oslo, Norway, following a support gig to REM on August 3,1995. Later the lyrics were rewritten and a new glockenspiel melody was added.

Yorke (from Humo magazine July 22, 1997): "We wanted it to have the atmosphere of Marvin Gaye. Or Louis Armstrong's 'Wonderful World.'"

Thom Yorke told Q magazine a song such as "No Surprises" has to be played a certain way for it to work live. "If you play it right, it is f--king dark," he said. "But it's like acting. It's on the edge of totally hamming it up but you're not. It's just the words are so dark. When we play it, we have to play it slow. It only sounds good if it's fragile."

The video for No Surprises, directed by Grant Lee, is one continuous shot of Yorke, who is trapped in a water chamber that fills midway through the song. He holds his breath for nearly a minute before the water recedes, at which point he gasps for breath and continues miming the song.

Karma Police is about fate and how it will always catch up with you. The band members used to warn each other that the "karma police" would get them if they didn't behave.

Thom Yorke: "Karma is important. The idea that something like karma exists makes me happy. It makes me smile. 'Karma Police' is dedicated to everyone who works for a big firm. It's a song against bosses."

The video for Karma Police is one of the most memorable of its era. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, who had previously worked on the Radiohead video for "Street Spirit (Fade out)," it shows Thom Yorke in the back seat of a 1976 Chrysler New Yorker, which is driven down a dark road by a driver we never see. When a disheveled man appears in the headlights running from the vehicle, it seems whoever is in the car is after him. But then this man lights a book of matches and ignites a trail of gasoline that leads to the vehicle, setting it on fire.

The video seems suited for the song, as karma strikes the driver, but Glazer didn't write it with Radiohead in mind. He came up with the idea for Marilyn Manson, who was looking for a video for his song "Long Hard Road Out of Hell" and had Glazer watch the David Lynch film Lost Highway for inspiration. In the opening text limit

Working Man Album: Rush (1974)
by Rush

Rush released their self-titled debut album on their own label, Moon Records, in 1974. A DJ named Donna Halper at WMMS in Cleveland, Ohio, listened to the last track, "Working Man," and put it on the air, giving the band liftoff. It fit her criteria for three reasons:

1) Cleveland was a working town, and the lyrics were very relatable to their audience.

2) WMMS was an album-oriented rock station, so they looked for songs that other stations weren't playing.

3) Running 7:07, the song gave plenty of time for the DJ to take a bathroom or smoke break.

Immediately, the radio station received calls from people asking when the new Led Zeppelin album was coming out; they were surprised to learn that the vocalist was not Robert Plant, but Geddy Lee, lead singer for a new band called Rush. Thanks to the airplay, the album picked up steam in Cleveland and got the attention of Mercury Records, which signed the band and re-released the album with their promotional might behind it. With the backing of a major label, Rush soon became one of the most popular rock bands in the US and Canada.

This was one of the few popular Rush songs not co-written by Neil Peart, who hadn't joined the group yet (John Rutsey was their drummer). Like most songs on their debut album, "Working Man" was written by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.

This song tells the story of a typical working man, stuck his routine of putting in his hours, coming home, then doing it all over again the next day. He has greater ambitions, but doesn't seem to have the will to act on them:

It seems to me I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson never had 9-5s like this guy, but they did put in the work, playing any gig they could get after forming the band while they were still in high school.
Does this sound like a certain Led Zeppelin song? Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett told Martin Popoff that it sounds a lot like "Heartbreaker."

Working Man was used in a 2014 commercial for Walmart, where they touted their support of American factories.
Longtime Rush roadie Ian Grandy once heard Geddy Lee state that if there is one "ultimate" Rush song, it's "Working Man."
This was the last song Rush played live, using it as the capper to their R40 Live tour, which ended on August 1, 2015 with a show at The Forum near Los Angeles. On the tour, they played songs in reverse chronological order, starting with their newest songs and working backwards, with the backdrops changing to reflect the era.

The band didn't announce it as a farewell tour, but did say it would "most likely be their last major tour of this magnitude." Neil Peart had threatened retirement before, but this time he was more resolute: He was wearing down physically and wanted to spend more time with his young daughter. When the show ended, he "crossed the back-line meridian" for the first time, joining Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson at the front of the stage text limit

Kashmir Album: Physical Graffiti (1975)
by Led Zeppelin

All band members agreed Kashmir was one of their best musical achievements. Robert Plant said it was "One of my favorites... it was so positive, lyrically." Page has answered the question "What is the greatest Zeppelin riff of all" by citing this song.

Plant wrote the lyrics in 1973 while driving through the Sahara Desert on the way to the National Festival of folklore in Morocco. Kashmir is in Southern Asia; he was nowhere near it. In Mojo magazine, September 2010, Plant explained: "'Kashmir' came from a trip Jimmy and me made down the Moroccan Atlantic coast, from Agadir down to Sidi Ifni. We were just the same as the other hippies really."

The original title was "Driving To Kashmir."

This runs 8:31. Radio stations had no problem playing it, especially after "Stairway To Heaven," which was almost as long, did so well.

Kashmir, also known as Cashmere, is a lush mountain region North of Pakistan. India and Pakistan have disputed control of the area for years. The fabric Cashmere is made from the hair of goats from the region. The area is also famous for growing poppies, from which heroin is made.

Plant thinks John Bonham's drumming is the key to this: "It was what he didn't do that made it work."

The signature guitar riff began as a tuning cycle Jimmy Page had been using for years.

This is one of the few Zeppelin songs to use outside musicians. Session players were brought in for the string and horn sections. Jimmy Page said (Rolling Stone, 2012): "I knew that this wasn't just something guitar-based. All of the guitar parts would be on there. But the orchestra needed to sit there, reflecting those other parts, doing what the guitars were but with the colors of a symphony."

Speaking with Dan Rather in 2018, Robert Plant said: "It was a great achievement to take such a monstrously dramatic musical piece and find a lyric that was ambiguous enough, and a delivery that was not over-pumped. It was almost the antithesis of the music, this lyric and this vocal delivery that was just about enough to get in there."

Led Zeppelin played this in every live show from it's debut in 1975 to their last concert in 1980.

Page and Plant recorded this with an orchestra and Moroccan musicians for their 1994 Unledded album.

Puff Daddy (he wasn't Diddy yet) sampled this in 1998 for a song called "Come With Me." He performed it on Saturday Night Live with Page on guitar.

The remaining members of Led Zeppelin performed this at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary party in 1988 with Jason Bonham on drums. It was a mess - the keyboards got lost in the feed and Plant was bumped by a fan and forgot some of the words. They had more success when they performed the song on December 10, 2007 at a benefit show to raise money for the Ahmet Ertegun education fund.

In the movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Mike Damone tells Mark Ratner, "When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, text limit

After the Gold Rush
When You Dance I can Really Love Album: After The Gold Rush (1970)
by Neil Young

I made this long ago with Microsoft Clip Champ... I've since moved on but the audio was horrible so I made it less horrible. 101 reasons I was never put in "marketing". Much love.

Except for the track "Birds", recorded on June 30, 1970, at Sound City Studios, the remainder of the album was recorded at various sessions in a makeshift basement studio ("Redwood Studios") in Young's Topanga Canyon home during March and April 1970 with CSNY bassist Greg Reeves, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina and burgeoning eighteen-year-old musical prodigy Nils Lofgren of the Washington, D.C.-based band Grin on piano. The incorporation of Lofgren was a characteristically idiosyncratic decision by Young, as Lofgren had not played keyboards on a regular basis prior to the sessions. Along with Jack Nitzsche, Lofgren would join an augmented Crazy Horse sans Young before enjoying success with his own group as well as solo cult success and membership in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. Biographer Jimmy McDonough has asserted that Young was intentionally trying to combine Crazy Horse and CSNY on this release, with members of the former band appearing alongside Stephen Stills (who contributed backing vocals to "Only Love Can Break Your Heart") and Reeves. The cover art is a solarized image of Young passing an old woman at the New York University School of Law campus in the Greenwich Village district of New York City. The picture was taken by photographer Joel Bernstein and was reportedly out of focus. It was because of this he decided to mask the blurred face by solarizing the image. The photo is cropped; the original image included Young's friend and CSNY bandmate Graham Nash.

Songs on the album were inspired by the Dean Stockwell-Herb Bermann screenplay for the unmade film After the Gold Rush. Young had read the screenplay and asked Stockwell if he could produce the soundtrack. Tracks that Young recalls as being written specifically for the film are "After the Gold Rush" and "Cripple Creek Ferry". The script has since been lost...

"After the Gold Rush" is widely known as an environmentalism song, with its chorus, "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s" (changed to "in the 21st century" once the '70s ended). The song is actually far stranger than that, though. In the book Shakey, Jimmy McDonough summarizes that strangeness as well as anybody when he says, "Accompanied by a mournful French horn, Young tickles the ivories and sings a tale of time travel that culminates in an exodus to another planet."

The song is structured to take listeners through time. The first verse in set in the Middle Ages, the second in the time it was written in, and the third in the future. In 1992, Young explained it thusly: "[It's] about three times in history: There's a Robin Hood scene, there's a fire scene in the present and there's the future... the air is yellow text limit

I'm A Man Album: The Best of the Spencer Davis Group (1967)
Gimme Some Lovin Album: The Best of the Spencer Davis Group (1966)
The Spencer Davis Group

This was the final Spencer Davis Group release to feature Steve Winwood, who left to form Traffic. I'm A Man was originally written for a documentary called Swinging London, but the band liked it so much they saved it for a single.

I'm A Man is a different song from Bo Diddley's R&B classic number of the same name, which was later an American Top 20 hit for The Yardbirds.

The song returned to the UK Top 75 in 2008 thanks to a British television advert for the Volkswagen Polo which featured a dog singing enthusiastically to I'm A Man.

"I'm A Man" has been a hit for three different acts, the Spencer Davis Group original being followed by Chicago's 7 minutes, 40 seconds version recorded for their 1969 debut album, The Chicago Transit Authority. Released as a single it reached #8 in the UK in 1970. In the US it was originally released as the B-side to a re-release of "Questions 67 and 68." Radio stations ended up playing both sides, and it eventually peaked at #49 in 1971. Its last chart appearance came in 1989 when the Italian studio outfit Clubhouse turned it into a medley with "Ye Ke Ye Ke," which limped to #69.

In a 2003 interview with the Dutch music series Top 2000 agogo, Winwood spoke about how I'm A Man laid the groundwork for his subsequent band, Traffic. "We were kind of experimenting with what is now called world music - it didn't exist then - but Afro-Caribbean music which we'd been listening to," he explained. "'I'm A Man' was actually significant because it was the last Spencer Davis Group song before Traffic. So it was a significant transition because we were using these Afro-Caribbean elements in that music and then we went on in Traffic to combine that with many more elements like folk music and jazz and rock to try and combine all these elements."

Winwood shares songwriting credit with the album's producer, Jimmy Miller. Spencer Davis told Musician Magazine in 1988 how the song came together: "Lyrically, 'I'm A Man' was the brainchild of New York producer Jimmy Miller, who had a feel for the American market... and Jimi Hendrix showed me the E-7th guitar chord on the track. Steve provided the rest of the American R&B edge with his marvelous vocals and keyboards."

Keith Emerson, keyboardist of the Nice and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, recorded a disco version of I'm A Man for the 1981 action thriller Nighthawks, starring Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams. It's used in a key scene whre Stallone's character recognizes a terrorist at a disco club. Many of the DVD releases, however, use different music for the scene.

I'm A Man was also used in these TV series:

The Umbrella Academy (Season 2, Episode 2 - 2020)
High & Dry ("The Trial" - 2018)
Mad Men ("Time Zones" - 2014)
Moonlighting ("Tale In Two Cities" - 1987)

And it these movies:

Minions (2015)
Pawn Sacrifice (2014)
textlim

St. Joe On The School Bus Album: Marcy Playground (1997)
Sex And Candy Album: Marcy Playground (1997)
Ancient Walls Of Flowers Album: Marcy Playground (1997)
by Marcy Playground

In an interview with Marcy Playground lead singer/songwriter John Wozniak, explained that "St. Joe On The School Bus" is about getting picked on on the school bus. It's not about anyone specific, but John did have some rough times at school. He told us: "I was bullied as a kid, and for a little period there I think I probably started bullying kids because I was bullied, and so I understand it. I don't know if it's bullying, but I got in a lot of fights after a while. Because I didn't like people getting in my face when I was young. Or getting in my friends' faces. And I'm Irish and Polish so I got in a lot of fights. But it started with just getting picked on."

Marcy Playground is best-known for their hit "Sex and Candy." "St. Joe on the School Bus" was their next single, and the closest they came to another hit: it topped out at #8 on the US Modern Rock charts.

Like many of Marcy Playground's videos, St. Joe On The School Bus is very surreal. It involves a child literally crying wolf and suffering the consequences. Wozniak told us: "That video was done by Hammer and Tongs, the guys that produced and directed The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy movie. These guys are funny. They're British. And they're very funny. I like their sense of humor. And I've seen a few of their videos, and not all of them are funny, but they had this great idea for that video, and I liked it."

With images of "disco lemonade" and "double cherry pie," this is one of the more puzzling songs of the '90s, and according to Marcy Playground songwriter/lead singer John Wozniak, Sex And Candy pulls many things from many places. In an interview he explained: "Where did I get the 'sex and candy' part from? Well, I was dating a girl and she was going to Bryn Mawr College and it's where my dad teaches. And I was probably 17 or something like that and she was like 18. I always liked the older girls. (laughs) But we were in her dorm room, and her roommate came in and she saw us there, and she was like, 'Oh, it smells like sex and candy in here.' And I always remembered that. And that was back in the late '80s.

And then when I was writing the song and I was coming up with all these weird disco-era references that I was making up, 'platform double suede' and all that business, I was like, 'hey, let's just throw in that phrase that's been sticking in my head for the last five years or whatever.' So I wrote that song in '92, '93, somewhere around there. And it didn't really come out until '97. That song had been at least in my consciousness since the late '80s. At least with the concepts behind it.

But it's just about seeing some sexy girl and then falling in love, and then asking a dumb question to yourself... well, it's not even asking a question. It's just – I don't know!! I don't know. text limit

In the Light Album: Physical Graffiti (1975)
by Led Zeppelin

The song was composed primarily by bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones on synthesizer, though singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page also received songwriting credits.

The unique sound of the intro was created by Page using a bow on an acoustic guitar, as a backdrop to Jones' opening synthesizer solo. The song is based on an earlier band composition titled "In the Morning".

Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones composed most of this on a synthesizer. They never played the song live because Jones could not reproduce the synthesizer sound outside the studio.

Near the beginning of the song, Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow. He also used the bow on "Dazed And Confused" and "How Many More Times." Talking about the song in the BBC book The Guitar Greats, Page said: "Once the vocal lines and phrasing were sorted out, you'd know where not to play, which was as important as knowing when you should play. With 'In The Light,' for instance, we knew exactly what its construction was going to be, but nevertheless, I had no idea at the time that John Paul Jones was going to come up with such an amazing synthesizer intro, plus there's all the bowed guitars at the beginning as well, to give the overall drone effect. We did quite a few things with drones on, like 'In The Evening' and all that, but when he did that start for 'In The Light' it was just unbelievable."

This was one of Jimmy Page's favorite songs on Physical Graffiti. In the interviews preceding the release of the album, he spoke of the song as the follow-up to "Stairway To Heaven."

In the Light
Led Zeppelin
Written by: John Paul Jones, James Patrick Page, Robert Anthony Plant
Album: Physical Graffiti
1975

And if you feel that you can't go on
And your will's sinkin' low
Just believe, and you can't go wrong
In the light you will find the road
You will find the road

Oh, did you ever believe that I could leave you
Standing out in the cold
I know how it feels 'cause I have slipped through
To the very depths of my soul
Ooh baby, I just want to show you what a clear view
It is from every bend in the road
Now listen to me
Oh, whoa-whoa, as I was
And really would be for you, too, honey
As you would for me, oh, I would share your load
Let me share your load
Ooh, let me share, share your load

And if you feel that you can't go on
In the light you will find the road
Though the winds of change may blow around you
But that will always be so
Whoa whoa, when love is pain it can devour you, but you are never alone
I will share your load, I will share your load
Baby, let me, oh, let me

In the light
Everybody needs the light
Ooh yeah
Ooh baby
In the light, in the light, in the light

Light, light, light, in the light
Light, light, light, in the light, ooh, yeah
Light, light, light, in the light

Light, light, light, in the light
Light, light, light, in the light, ooh, yeah
Light, light, light, in the light