Al Stewart's songs of History and Society

[Deleted member 1]

I sometimes observe that people born "out of time" or raised by older folk (as Al was raised by his grandfather, a WW1 veteran) have older sensibilities. Despite being technically a soft rock musician of the Pit, I've always held that Al Stewart's music, woven with that English slightly-precious sense of history, to be an amazing example of what racinated modern music could be like. I love every one of his songs. So let's start a musical tour of history and Al's work with one of his songs about the First World War -- a memory of his grandfather, and a meditation on the last hours of an England, a Russia, and a Europe which would never be again:

 

[Deleted member 1]

A Masterpiece of lyrical perfection, from the amber along the shores of the Baltic to the poetry of the Tigers themselves having souls, a song which in a few chords can tell the vicious story of a hard-fought rear-guard action, and which ends on some of the most crushing verse ever sung, this is perhaps the only English-language song to capture anything of Russia's unrelenting and brutal experience in the "Great Patriotic War". Without further ado:

 

[Deleted member 1]

Modern Times, a lyrical thesis on aging into adulthood, the Pit, and the spiritual emptiness of the modern world, at least from my perspective as the listener. Indeed, like the subject of this song, I have "got no use for the tricks of Modern Times".

 

[Deleted member 1]

Of course, I have an Al song that basically describes me, so I have to indulge and post it next:

 

[Deleted member 1]

Helen and Cassandra, but of course Al wrote a beautiful song to contrast them and meditate on mythos.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Now here is this absolutely amazing live rendition of Al Stewart's smokey, haunted, aethereal Nostradamus which in the middle, during the bridge, slides into an entire second song and back out, which is a meditation on the impermanence of power. It's just astonishing in every respect.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Could you want anything more hauntingly beautiful? I mean, really?

 

[Tachikoma's Aunt]

I've always liked Night Train to Munich. Probably because learning to pass as genetic female has a lot of skill overlap with intelligence work.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Thank you, Helen, for adding Night Train to Munich.



Let's have another international mystery song, then.

 

[Tachikoma's Aunt]

I have never found a song that better espouses why winning the war is irrelevant if you cannot win the peace. If the American people were not culturally incapable of appreciating this lesson, most of the foreign policy issues of the past thirty years or so could have been avoided.