Part III: Falling from the mountain: Never rains but it snows
Although I personally consider it one of his best-crafted and important albums ever, critics hated his 1984 effort, “Windows and walls”. I don't know why, but they did. Maybe it's just easier to tear something down when there's just a tiny foothold to grab, but this album produced no hits and largely went unremarked upon and made no impression upon the charts, but it's a fine album, with again some of Dan's darkest lyrics and some tough subject matter.
Continuing a practice that had begun with “Phoenix” and followed through to “The innocent age”, this album has no picture of Dan on the cover. Instead, there's a picture of an empty room, with an old rocking-chair as the centrepiece. The sleeve denotes loneliness, neglect, age, and indeed “Windows and walls” explores the concept of neglect, most powerfully in the title track but also in the longest on the album, “Tucson, Arizona (Gazette)”, where Dan sings of two lost souls coming together, both of whom have been effectively abandoned by society, and who go off together on one last fatal road trip. The song also contains his first, and only, reference to the use of drugs, possibly a reason why the album was looked down on, and also why this song would get little radio airplay.
But it's one song, one reference, and should not be taken as characterising the whole album. There are the usual great ballads, “Believe in me”, “Sweet Magnolia”, as well as more fiery, uptempo almost rock numbers like “Let her go” and “The language of love”, not to mention his dire warning of the path we're all headed on if we don't change our ways, in the closer “Gone too far”, which features a storming guitar opening and an atmospheric, chilling conclusion almost akin to the end of the world. Dan certainly had a lot to say, and was not shy about saying it.
His commercial popularity however, sadly, would come to pretty much an end here. After the huge expectations of a follow-up to a blockbuster like “The innocent age”, it would seem to the world at large that he had not delivered, and his next album would perhaps be a backlash against that by the artist, a feeling of to hell with them, I'm going back to my roots. Returning to the style of his debut, the new album was even more country-oriented, with a strong bluegrass sound helped along by the likes of Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill and his own idol, Chris Hillman all joining to help him create an album that was so far off the beaten track in terms of commercial appeal, and so removed from his recent bestsellers that he even went back to using a picture of himself on the cover.
Again, I have to admit that I really hated this album. At the time, of course, it came as a great shock to me that Dan Fogelberg would release a country album. The hints, of course, are there if you look for them: in the title of the album (though I had assumed that just to mean, snows in the high country, country with a lowercase “c”) and in the songs. Titles like “Sutter's mill”, “The outlaw” and “Wandering shepherd” can of course now be seen to indicate a country album, but at the time I didn't know he was going in this direction and I mentally lambasted the album. I think I even sold it, not wanting it in my collection. Ah, the naivete of youth!
It wasn't until much later, when I downloaded it in the age of the internet, and listened to it ---
really listened to it, this time --- that I realised what a fine album it is. Sure, it's not the Dan Fogelberg I'd come to know and love, and not the music I had expected, but it was a brave step, possibly even a commercially unsound one, for him to decide to go in that direction. The album, unsurprisingly, did not do well --- on the mainstream charts. But it did very well in the country charts, and has in fact gone down as one of the bestselling bluegrass albums in history.
Again, though, for me this was a bump in the road, and I greedily and impatiently awaited his next, ahem, real album. I would have to wait two more years though, but it would be worth it. Dan began writing songs for the new album soon after finishing “High country snows”, at the tail-end of 1985, and during this time he was going through his first divorce --- he was married three times. Whereas he had previously admitted that he had not had much luck in the way of relationships and wrote about the lives and loves of others, observational rather than personal songwriting, he now had more than enough relationship baggage to inform a whole album, and like Phil Collins in 1981, that was exactly the kind of album he produced.
As if to cast aside some of his past, change his image and his outlook, try to put the past behind him as much as he could, Dan sports a totally new look on the cover, which again returns to the practice --- abandoned between 1979 and 1984 --- of using a picture of himself on the sleeve. He's shaven, clean cut. The long straggly locks he sported even on the last album are gone, as are the chunky jumpers and scarves, and for perhaps the first time when an image of him has been used, he's looking directly at the camera, directly at the buyer or owner of the record. His eyes are deep and soulful, serious and just a little intimate, a little dangerous too, and there's for the first time seen in his face the barest suggestions of Native American. I don't think there is any such blood in his family, but his face just seems to have that shape. Maybe it's a trick of the light, or the way the photograph was framed.
The album, too, is more serious. Mostly dealing with relationships and how they break down, there's bitterness in “She don't look back”, anger and frustration in “Look what you're doing”, and yearning emptiness in ballads like “Seeing you again” and “Our last farewell”. The album didn't yield any hits --- that part of his fame was over for Dan, and in ways I don't think he was sorry --- but there are some amazing tracks on it, like the piano-driven “Hearts in decline”, with its soulful vocal chorus, or the staggering closer (on my vinyl copy, anyway) “Our last farewell”, in which Dan finally accepts what has happened and prepares to move on.
By this point, Russ Kunkel and Joe Lalas were both firmly entrenched as permanent fixtures in Dan's band, both on the road and in the studio, and his expertise on other instruments was coming to the fore: on this album he plays guitar, synthesiser, drum machine, vibraphone, bass, acoustic guitar, piano, guitar synth, keyboards and of course sings.