Hell with this. I'm going to cheat for once and reprint the review I wrote of this album, all the way back in 2013. Wall of text ahoy!
Time Passages - Al Stewart - 1978 (RCA)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... okay, not far away at all. This one, in fact. But a long time ago certainly, I used to do radio DJ work on a small - very small - local radio station. One night, while the records spun and I was bored I decided to go look through what was laughingly called a library. This was essentially a motley collection of records that other DJs had brought up to the station and either left behind by mistake, or just couldn't face bringing home with them. It was a few wooden shelves of records from artists you had never heard of (or would want to), mostly Irish traditional or country with perhaps some "debut" singles from people who would never be let near a recording studio again, some handouts by artists who mistakenly hoped we'd play them on air (we never did) and the odd decent album. This was of course the aforementioned, and I came across it, knowing of Al Stewart pretty much from his big hit "Year of the Cat" and also one or two other songs I'd heard on the radio (though not, ironically, "Song on the Radio"!) so I decided to, er, borrow it. Kind of forgot to bring it back. Oh well. Their loss is my gain, or something.
Al Stewart is one of those people you know but don't know. Most of you will know the abovementioned song, although you may not be aware who sings it and may have heard the odd other song by him, but you, and I, will be unaware that he was such a pivotal figure in the early pop/rock/folk scene in the fifties and sixties. He's the man who can lay claim, literally, to knowing Yoko before she ever met Lennon, to sharing an apartment with a young man called Paul Simon, and playing the very first Glastonbury Festival in 1970. He has also released sixteen studio and three live albums, and had six of his singles chart over the seventies, two of which hit the top ten, but only one of which made any impact at all this side of the pond, that being the famous "Year of the Cat", which barely scraped in at number 31. But chart position is not everything, and that song particularly has proved far more popular and enduring than its paltry chart performance would have you believe.
The title track gets us underway with a nice soft digital piano and some acoustic guitar, gentle percussion and it's the sort of laidback, middle-of-the-road rock that typified much of the seventies. Good driving music I would think. It's one of the hit singles off the album, in fact the one that rose highest in the charts, at least Stateside. A sort of reflective song with an air of quiet resolution about it, it's shot through with some nice sax breaks from Phil Kenzie that unlike many sax players doesn't take over the song but enhances it gently with his playing, through when he wants to break out in a "Year of the Cat" moment he certainly can do that with aplomb. Some lovely guitar from Stewart and fine piano from one of three keyboard players used on the album, you can see how this became a hit: it was a real song for the times. Probably wouldn't even get a single airplay these days if it were written today.
Stewart's voice is strong but not overbearing at any time, and I always felt he had a somewhat slightly feminine lilt to his voice, which isn't meant as any sort of criticism, just how he always appeared to me. Big sax break as we near the end of the song and you can see how Stewart was building on the phenomenal success of his big hit single from the previous year, as this song does retain many of the hallmarks of "Year of the Cat" without being a copy in any way. Simple gentle piano then starts "Valentina Way", but it quickly metamorphoses into an uptempo rocker on the back of electric guitar, sort of Dave Edmunds in structure and feel, the piano getting much more rock-and-roll now. It's interesting to note that, though he had no input into the songwriting that I know of, this is one of the early jobs for Alan Parsons as producer, and this song has a lot of the melody of many of the songs he would go on to oversee with the Alan Parsons Project. Whether he influenced this one or took influences away to his own solo career is not a question I can answer, but there's definitely an echo of "Valentina Way" in later songs to appear on APP albums.
"Life in Dark Water" is far more ominous, with a big heavy drumbeat and atmospheric guitar, great work behind the skins by Jeff Porcaro, just a year before he would found Toto and go on to fame and fortune. This song is the slowest on the album so far, not a ballad by any means but a real slowburner, dramatic and powerful with a certain feeling of claustrophobia about it. Then halfway through it goes into a bouncy, boppy Beatlesesque rhythm before bringing in some very effective guitar and piano for the middle eighth. I hear echoes of early Dan Fogelberg in here too, and the sonar effect at the end is both clever and chilling, when you realise the subject matter. A more mid-tempo song which to be fair takes a little from the melody of the opener, "A Man for All Seasons" is a nice little track, with a piano run which ELO would later rob for their hit "Confusion" (Okay, they probably didn't even know about it, but it is very similar) and another interesting lyrical theme, this time Thomas Moore, historical arch-enemy of King Henry VIII, with some rather telling comments on religion along the way. Nice backing vocals and some warbly organ with yet another really inspiring guitar solo from Stewart.
Little country/folk then for "Almost Lucy", a much more uptempo song that just makes you tap your foot, and brings back those memories of Dan Fogelberg to me at any rate if to no-one else. Excellent piece of Spanish guitar, then everything slows down in a
very Alan Parsons way - or I suppose I should be fair and say, a sound that would become Parsons' trademark - for the stately and grandiose "Palace of Versailles". Nice, measured drumming and some fine work on the keys with Stewart's clear voice rising above it all, it's a retelling of the French Revolution, and the orchestration near the end is again very similar to the sound we would grow used to hearing from the APP. "Timeless Skies" has a certain sense of Chris de Burgh about it - certainly his earlier work, such as
Far Beyond These Castle Walls and
At the End of a Perfect Day - and some soft accordion from Peter White, then the other big hit from this album is "Song on the Radio", which is about as commercial as you can get really for the time.
With a big breakout sax solo starting the song it bops along really nicely, and you can again hear elements of later ELO here; perhaps Jeff Lynne listened to Al Stewart and took some influences from him? It has one of the best hooks which manages to almost qualify the lyric:
"You're on my mind/ Like a song on the radio" and which should have guaranteed it success in the charts, though it only hit outside the top thirty. It has gone on to become one of his best and most-played songs though, and much of this is certainly down to the energetic and flamboyant sax work of Kenzie, in marked contrast to his work on the opener. The song pretty much rides on his sax lines and the piano melody too. Of course, it all comes together under Al Stewart's friendly, gentle and everyman voice, which sells the song like no-one else could. The album ends on one of my favourites of his, which was used by one of the radio stations I used to listen to as their "closedown" song, rather appropriately, as it's called "End of the Day".
If the title track was reflective, the song that closes the album is doubly so. Carried on a sparkling guitar line with a real laidback feel, some rippling piano and some flowing Spanish guitar, it's a short song but it doesn't need to be long. It's almost an instrumental, and a real showcase for the guitar work of the man whose name adorns the cover of the album. Just when you think there are going to be no vocals his voice floats in, with just a few lines, all the more effective for their brevity and the song is in fact the perfect ending to the album, the musical representation of the sun sinking slowly in the west, its rays splashing out over the darkening sea, with the promise of its return tomorrow.
TRACK LISTING
1. Time Passages
2. Valentina Way
3. Life in Dark Water
4. A man for All Seasons
5. The Palace of Versailles
6. Almost Lucy
7. Timeless Skies
8. Song on the Radio
9. End of the Day
Songwriters like Al Stewart don't come along too often. He's had a pretty big influence on music down the decades, working with people like Jimmy Page, Tori Amos, Rick Wakeman and of course Alan Parsons, and yet few people are even aware of his existence. If it wasn't for "Year of the Cat" being a minor hit over here we'd have nothing to mark his presence in the charts at all. And yet that record is played and requested more than most other songs from this era, even today. Timeless classics, you see, don't date and they don't go out of fashion, and even if time does continue in its passage, and we can do nothing to stop it, music like this lives on down the years.
A man for all seasons, indeed.
Rating: 8.1/10