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Welcome back to another Tuesday Afternoon! Our Days of Future Passed have finally reached the tipping point, moving from the early part of the day to the Evening.

Evening is actually the second half of a single track that also contains Tuesday Afternoon, but for the purposes of this series, I’m treating them as separate entities. Evening is another John Lodge track, another one of those early songs that wrestles with shoulds and wants. The idea that the work day is finally over and your life belongs only to yourself again, at least for a short while. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard it, the plaintive “I’m tired of working away…” touches some vulnerable part of my soul every single time. (Please don’t ask me how many times it’s made me cry, because the answer is “all of them”.)

Unfortunately, this is a track that gets sort of buried, squashed between Tuesday Afternoon and Sunset/Twilight Time.

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.

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Welcome back to another Tuesday Afternoon! We continue working through our Days of Future Passed with the eponymous Tuesday Afternoon.

Tuesday Afternoon, the track Justin Hayward once said he wrote by “smoking a funny cigarette in a field one day”

Honestly, do I really have to say anything at all about it? This song, along with Nights in White Satin, were still radio staples when I was growing up, though of the two, Nights definitely holds the more timeless quality. Tuesday Afternoon will always feel like summer to me, warm, humid, on the way to the Dairy Barn for ice cream.

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.

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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.

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Third up as we continue moving through our day is Another Morning, and our first glimpse into the mind of Ray Thomas.

Another morning is upbeat, cheerful, gentle, and optimistic, outlining the morning through the lens of childhood. In some ways, I feel like it is almost a spiritual predecessor to The White Stripes We’re Going to be Friends. The contributions from the London Festival Orchestra weave seamlessly into the intro and outro as well, and, considering the fact that the band and the orchestra were never in the studio at the same time, feel completely natural with each other.

Different members of the band have joked from time to time that none of them was really prepared to write a song about the early part of the day, because none of them were ever awake at that point. Even now, on John Lodge’s current tour, he cheerfully reminds the audience of the moment that Ray emerged with Legend of a Mind, “after waking up bright and early… you know, at about 4pm.”

But Ray’s sensibilities are very complimentary to a song like this, particularly because so many of his themes revolve around a sort of magical realism. Dipping back into the wonder of childhood doesn’t really seem like so much of a stretch.

I know that, even when I’m interested in something completely socially acceptable (or worse yet, popular!) the parts that interest me really aren’t the usual ones. In the case of the Moodies as a whole, part of what has always intrigued me is the fact that every one of them was sort of private. They once sold out two back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden, and then were able to just leave the venue and walk unaccompanied and unnoticed through New York City. On one hand, it sort of makes me long for the days when someone could do that, maintain that sort of distance between their fame, their persona, and their personal life. On the other, it’s sometimes infuriating trying to get a read on who any of them really were as people. And, like, I know I will never know, not really, but I have always thought that, of all five of them, Ray was always the easiest to get a handle on.

There’s this moment, in the far-flung future from where we’re standing right now, in the video for The Voice, when the camera pans across Justin and John and, on the farthest side of the stage, you can see Ray shoot the most mirthful eyes at John, and then do this little butt-wiggle and his whole face crinkles up with glee. And the next time the camera lands on John’s face, you can see him trying to swallow whatever his reaction to that actually was. The two of them had been friends forever, they had been bandmates, they had been roommates, and that weird little moment of interplay is committed to celluloid forever. And it is my absolute favorite.

As always, if you are interested in obtaining a physical copy of Days of Future Passed for your collection (and I always recommend owning physical copies of the media you love), you can do so here.

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Welcome back to Tuesday Afternoon, my ridiculous journey through the Moody Blues’ catalog, one track at a time. Today, we’ve finally seen the sun rise, with Dawn is a Feeling.

Written by Mike Pinder and sung by Justin Hayward, Dawn is optimistic and devastating in the exact same moment. “This day will last a thousand years” balanced against “It’s true, life flies faster than eyes could ever see”.

I get hung up in that juxtaposition, partially because it’s not something that I would have thought of or known how to put into words while I was still in my 20s, but that haunts me all the same. Mike was still 25 when Days was released and, while I know I wasn’t what you’d consider a normal 25 year old either… It still impresses me.

And, hearing John Lodge sing it 58 years later gives it something different. Maybe a little more desperation, a little more despair, and a little tighter grip on each day as it passes. Or, if not a tighter grip, at least a keen awareness of the passing of time, in spite of the fact that there’s nothing we can really do to change it.

…At least next week, we get a Ray song. Ray’s songs are always more cheerful. …to a point.

If you are interested in purchasing a physical copy of Days for yourself, you can do so here.

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I’ll be honest, starting at the literal beginning feels sort of like starting with a whimper instead of a bang.

Days of Future Passed was released in November of 1967, and if you know absolutely anything at all about the Moody Blues, you already know about Days. It was a brilliant bamboozle. Five young, broke guys, tasked with making a stereo demo album of Dvorák’s New World Symphony, convinced their collaborator, conductor Peter Knight, to not only record their own music instead, but to get the entire orchestra to riff off of it. Almost 60 years later, you’d still be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard Nights in White Satin at least once.

But the nighttime doesn’t come for a good while yet. We’re not even quite at dawn. The Day Begins is an overture. In fact, it’s mostly just the London Festival Orchestra (which is, in itself, a fictitious entity. They didn’t actually exist in their own right.) But you do get your first taste of that poetry. That poetry. You know what I’m talking about. That “Just the poem at the end of Nights in White Satin” poetry. Courtesy of drummer Graeme Edge and recorded by Mike Pinder.

Because I am insatiable when it comes to amassing information that is useful only to me, I can tell you that Graeme wrote all the poetry on the Moodies’ albums, mostly because he was ungovernable when it came to putting things to a meter. I can also tell you that Justin Hayward was quoted in an interview once saying that Mike recorded all his vocals lying on the floor in a pitch black room. This might be my favorite piece of information because, since Mike left the band in 1978, he wasn’t the easiest person for me to figure out. This was the missing piece for me, the one that sort of added the flavor of human weirdness that I hadn’t quite been able to get a handle on before that point.

For now, let’s let the dawn creep in. It’s lyrical, it’s ostentatious, it’s the (acknowledged) beginning of something that ended up lasting over 50 years.

…And because we can do semantics all night long, yes, I know that this isn’t the *actual* beginning of the *actual* Moody Blues. I do own Go Now. But it is a functional beginning of sorts. The moment when they decided to hang up everything they had done before, and make some magic instead.

If you are interested in purchasing a physical copy of Days for yourself, you can do so here.

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Oh Jesus, god. You thought you weren’t going to have to hear about these dudes on my blog. WELL, TOO BAD.

We all already know that Megan can’t resist a good pun/play on words, so when I was contemplating reviving Revisionist Vintage again, my only thought was “WHAT IF I REVIEWED EVERY SINGLE MOODY BLUES TRACK, IN ORDER, AND POSTED THEM EVERY TUESDAY AFTERNOON?”

So that, my friends, is exactly what I intend to do. Strap yourselves in.

I have 217 (give or take, I don’t think I’ve ever missed a day?) days of MeMadeMay content to slog through, but every Tuesday, you get a break. And, like, I do intend to use this space for other things as well… I just haven’t quite figured out what that means yet. I’m sure we’ll get there eventually. Or I’ll flame out spectacularly approximately 3 tracks into In Search of the Lost Chord (which would put us 10 weeks from now, in point of fact) and then never post a single thing ever again. There is no in between, I’m afraid.

If you’re still of the persuasion to purchase music in some kind of physical format, the Moodies albums are:

• Days of Future Passed– 1967
• In Search of the Lost Chord– 1968
• On the Threshold of a Dream– 1969
• To Our Children’s Children’s Children– 1969
• A Question of Balance– 1970
• Every Good Boy Deserves Favour– 1971
• Seventh Sojourn– 1972
• Octave– 1978
• Long Distance Voyager– 1981
• The Present– 1983
• The Other Side of Life– 1986
• Sur la Mer– 1988
• Keys to the Kingdom- 1991 (This one, and only this one, is bafflingly out of print)
• Strange Times– 1999
• December– 2003

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