Frigid Evening Ballad

 Song 755: This week the playlist comes around to Song for a Winter's Night by Gordon Lightfoot, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Not long after I got to Northwestern University in the late summer of 1969, I started hearing and learning a lot more about the music I liked. Being a singer/songwriter type myself, I added some LPs to my collection by folkies like Judy Collins and that new James Taylor fellow. In the fall of 1970, I expanded my interest in the Gordon guy and soon had a few of his 33s in my stack, including The Way I Feel, which contains this gem. It didn't take long to learn the lines and melodies as the disc got plenty of spins on the turntable. Living in the Chicago area for most of that decade, during the darker months I would often notice when the snow was softly falling, and then, when the morning light would steal across my window pane, I could tell where some webs of snow were drifting.

Twelve Feline Months

 Song 754: This week the playlist applauds Year of the Cat by Al Stewart, written by Al Stewart and Peter Wood, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. During my childhood years in the 1950s and 1960s, my family would visit friends and relatives who had both feline and canine companions, and while I always enjoyed a pet's company, I soon figured out that, if given the choice, I would rather hang out with a cat than a dog, although my own family could not have either kind of pet at the time. When Mr. Al decided to let us know what the year 1976 would become, I shared an apartment with a few friends on the south end of Evanston, IL, and spending a lot of time at a driver's wheel regularly, I got to hear the anthem quite a bit as it topped the charts. Depending on who rode in the vehicle, I sometimes would sing along with it, but other times could not do so, even though I might have wished that I could. Of course, back in that era I had no interest in contemplating a crime, and I usually didn't bother asking for explanations, so even when I found that I had thrown away my choice and lost my ticket, I still enjoyed riding along with those meowsome lines.

Cloudy Frost Season Tone

 Song 753: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on A Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon & Garfunkel, written by Paul Simon, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Those of us who reside in the northeastern section of the U.S. will probably in the next couple of months see a substantial amount of white stuff falling from the sky and accumulating in areas along the ground, so this folkie anthem pretty well describes a lot of what we'll see in the near future. While I might possibly have heard the piece when it climbed the charts in October of 1966, soon after I began my sophomore HS year, I would get to know it quite well after it appeared on the S&G 1968 Bookends LP. I did not have 33s at the time, but my closest friend Ed did have all four of the S&G discs, and every time I visited him during our senior HS year, which I did quite often, he would play all of those records at least once, so during my final HS year I got to hear Paul and Art a lot more than any other music stars. While I looked around for my possibilities that year, when I headed out to college the next year, that truly became the springtime of my life as an adult.

Satanic Perspective

 Song 752: This week the playlist recognizes Devil's Angle by Patti Rothberg, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. This time around, it's been eight weeks since my last personal friend song post, instead of seven, as it usually is, because I didn't, and couldn't, do a song post last week. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Patti in a recording studio back in 2003 - my studio partner David worked with her, and he introduced me to her at a recording studio one night. I soon got to enjoy her music, and when she released her Black Widow CD in 2013, she sent me a copy, I appreciated that gift, but unfortunately, when I played it on a CD player, the machine messed up the first track, which is the title tune. I never played another record on that player, but I was able to convert the other BW songs into mp3s and I got to hear the album that way via my mp3 players. Of course, long before the first time I heard this tune, I already understood how it feels looking for an angle for a new way to be, and perhaps, now that the new year has arrived, maybe a substantial number of people currently find themselves making that kind of search.