Tuesday Afternoon: Peak Hour

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Welcome back to another Tuesday Afternoon! We continue working through our day with the fourth track on Days of Future Passed: Peak Hour.

It’s very quickly going to become obvious that I am incredibly biased when it comes to any song written by John Lodge. Not because I’m incapable of impartiality, and not because they’re all my favorite (I promise, I love all the Moodies the same, at least as far as songwriting goes). I’m biased when it comes to John’s songs because it has always seemed to me that we are somehow speaking the same language.

Peak Hour is essentially a reference to rush hour traffic, everyone anxious to get from one place to the next. Per the Wikipedia page on Days, John essentially wrote it in the back of their van on the way from a gig.

There’s this distinct tension in John’s earliest songs, this one, (Evening) Time to Get Away, and Ride My See-Saw, that suggests an anxiety between what one is “supposed to” do, and what is, in some sense, fulfilling. They all sort of orbit around asking what is reasonable to want out of life, or what is reasonable to pursue. It does make sense, coming from someone who did, in fact, complete his education before returning to music.

And it’s a feeling that I’ve been wrestling with for most of my life.

There’s a sort of… not catharsis, exactly, but a sort of comfort, a kinship in hearing someone, long ago and not so long ago, and lightyears away, expressing feelings that you know deep in the pit of your soul. It’s one of the magical things about music. And it doesn’t really matter if someone is your contemporary or not. You can hear a piece of music from 400 years ago and it has the potential to touch you just the same.

As always, if you are so inclined to pick up a physical copy of Days of Future Passed for your collection, you can do so here.