cycle 4 - making modern music (or; clearer than the talloplanic view.)
Noodling into the foreverscape...
Hello, friends!
Welcome back for another cycle of Playlist Name Pending. It’s been a while! This one is a weird one, it’s a dip into a genre I love.
Progressive rock is like, the most geek music. I think it’s severely underrated. A divergent genre of rock ‘n’ roll that incorporates mathy jazz-fusion and ‘medieval’ instrumentation and every song is like 7 minutes long and everybody is rambling about knights and princesses and clerics and Tolkien and golf tournaments and war and space-faring magi. It’s cool to me. It’s all about vibe and narrative in addition to the technical wizardry of the musicians. Arpeggios and intricate time signatures are abundant, squirrely dudes with long hair going nuts on organs and fiddles are everywhere.
It’s time to discuss some PROG ROCK.
questions of my childhood (kansas, 1976.)
Woahhhhh!!! How about that for a banger? That riff? The synths, the bass? The fiddle I just mentioned!!?? I think this song is underrated in the world of prog-rock. We all know Kansas for “Carry On, Wayward Son” and “Dust In The Wind,” which are more closely associated with regular Classic Rock. But the rest of these guys’ music is Prog as hell! I think I first heard “Point of Know Return” in a commercial for some car insurance or something when I was a teen, and then got into them from there. This song goes crazy.
In the game of silent searching, the cost of love is rising and I’m just now realizing I’d be better off with you.
medieval overture (return to forever, 1976.)
We’re getting jazzy in here. Jazz-fusion is a subclass of prog in many ways, especially when they tie in the prog aesthetics.At the end of the day, it’s still music to play Dungeons & Dragons to.
flight of the moorglade (jon anderson, 1976)
Riding through the waves of unending years, three champions of peace and prosperity sail to achieve harmony on the Tallowcross. Olias, Ranyart, and Quoquaq, the architects of the ship Moorglade, venture through the winds of change amid chaos…
This is the one for me. Back in 2010, I was a sophomore/junior in high school and there was a record store in the strip mall across the road from the school. My friends and I would stay after school to hang out and go to the record store and the diner and goof off.
Those trips to the record store were hugely musically influential to me. Vinyl records were like 2 dollars in the bins so I was able to just pick up some stuff that looked interesting and didn’t think about it too much. I had a hand-me-down stereo unit with a cassette deck and a record player so I could actually play the records and get into the, This is how I got really into Devo and Talking Heads1 and Wings and had some baseline exposure to Bob Dylan, among many others.
OLIAS OF SUNHILLOW looked wonderful. I never heard of Jon Anderson before, never knew he was the frontman from Yes. I saw that artwork by David Fairbrother-Roe2, and a multi-page gatefold spread depicting a fantasy story about three mystical heroes building an ark ship to save the spirits of a dying planet. I was convinced this was going to be my favorite album of all-time. I raced home and listened to it. The rest… is history.
The first to venture, first to gain! Exploring daylight clearer than the Talloplanic view! And there they were; inside the Moorglade to move and to chant all through force to position…
Okay, it’s not my favorite album of all time, but it dang sure is up there. It’s hypnotic, it’s folksy, it’s got some spiritual chants and humming bass and jangle of the mandolins.
This song is one of the more upbeat (and catchier) songs about the Moorglade, the ship that Olias and company build to save their tribes from destruction.
The writing in this is wacky and weird and filled with made-up Proper Nouns. The tribes of Nagrunium, Asatranius, Oractaniom and Nordranious. The Moorglade Mover traveling across the plains of Tallowcross. A secret meeting in the Gardens of Geda. Olias and Raynart and Qoquaq! Fun mouth sounds happening on all of these.
I’ve always wanted to run a D&D campaign based on this story, but the way I’ve thought about it would be really dumb and near-impossible to pull off.
Maybe we’ll revisit this one day. I could write a mini 33⅓3 about this album.
Jon Anderson has been hyping up a sequel album for about 20 years now; ZAMRAN: SON OF OLIAS. If he ever releases what he promises to be a FOUR HOUR FANTASY ROCK OPERA EPIC, I will be seated4 and you will hear my review of it right here.
ace of wands (steve hackett, 1975.)
This was a mystery song to me for several years. It was featured as the opening track of something called “the sword podcast” or something on the download page of the band The Sword’s website, but I couldn’t find any information about what the song was. I put that podcast episode into Audacity and just clipped out the part that was this song. I didn’t know what it was for a long time and I guess I was okay with that.
Then, through the mist of a million years I grew a yearning to find the song again. I didn’t use Shazam or anything, I just scoured through the internet and listened to a lot of progressive rock. Boom! I had found the song. It was a solo project from Steve Hackett from Genesis! I sure had a knack for finding solo projects of guys from the mainstream prog-rock bands.
Anyway, this song is cool. Love the synth tone and the vibes here.
the spirit of radio (rush, 1980.)
In this cycle’s only song released narrowly outside the 1970s, we have Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio,” a song about the magic of loving music and the pain that capitalism brings to all art we consume. They defend electronic music as something human.
All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted,
not so coldly charted. It's really just a question of your honesty.
It is a bitter song about sell-outs and the businessmen who cast a pall over something so beloved and universal: good freakin’ music.
Live on, independent radio.
northern lights (renaissance, 1978.)
I gotta include Renaissance on the playlist. This song is consistently stuck in my head, it’s got a catchy as hell chorus.
I love a female vocalist in an otherwise very male-dominated musical space. That’s a big thumbs-up from me for Renaissance. If you’ve enjoyed any of this music so far, you should check them out further. This album is really solid.
This is the “single” I want to include on the Playlist…
But it’s not the topic I want to talk about.
The finale of this album is a 10-minute suite called “A Song For All Seasons,” which I am about to declare as the definitive inspiration for Nobuo Uematsu’s FINAL FANTASY VII soundtrack5. Specifically, “Those Who Fight,” or “Let The Battles Begin!” the main battle theme.
Just vibe and rock out to that for a minute. Think about ecology and big swords and ancient earthen spirits fighting for the balance of nature and anti-capitalism.
I definitely know that Nobuo Uematsu is generally a fan of prog-rock (the next song is also about his influences) but I don’t think I’ve seen people talk about specific songs, he lifted from and I especially have never seen Renaissance ever come up in those discussions. It’s always referencing some of the heavy-hitters of the genre, like Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, and…
tarkus - eruption, stones of years, iconoclast, mass, manticore, battlefield, aquatarkus (emerson, lake, & palmer, 1971.)
EMERSON… LAKE… AND PALMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry for putting a 20 minute song on here. It might be the easiest 20 minute song to listen to though. I used to use it as a treadmill song and I’ve probably listened to it 100 times in a row. The movements in this song are amazing. Everything is as exciting the 100th time you listen to it as it is on the 1st listen.
But this song… you’re hearing it, right? It’s FINAL FANTASY IX. It’s that exact flavor of music6. The keyboards, the rhythm, the energy. It is that video game. Final Fantasy IX is my personal favorite of the series. I love the tone, the goofy “classic” aesthetics and Shakespearean influences. It embodies the spirit of progressive rock more than any other Final Fantasy.
I’m always talking about video games in this music-based essay series. I guess it’s just such a formative topic for me. I get a lot of my language to describe things using games as comparison, and my taste was influenced at a young age with the games I played7.
Anyway, this song is a huge bop, the epitome of what I love about the genre, and it absolutely earns a spot on my ultimate Playlist. ELP, duuude!!
That’s all for this installment of Playlist Name Pending! Stay tuned for more next week (!) where we’ll branch away from discussing one genre of music.
Please consider commenting or subscribing or sharing with a friend. Let me know what you think about this one8 or if you have anything else to say to me!
Here’s a link to the entire playlist so far, if you want to subscribe to that on Spotify!
Bye!
Talking Heads ‘77… maybe the best album ever? Discuss.
David Fairbrother-Roe doing his version of the classic Yes fantasy ship artwork by Roger Dean who was unavailable to make the art for this album.
Would that be a “45”?
…and probably a little stoned!
Additionally, the opening piano riff is clearly the inspiration for Kingdom Heart’s “Hollow Bastion” theme, by Yoko Shimomura. It’s cool that this FF/Disney hybrid was composed with Disney and Final Fantasy music’s creative influences in mind. Check it out!
I’ve also seen people say this songs like parts of Final Fantasy VI’s “Dancing Mad”, which, I assume is accurate. FF6 is one of the remaining games in the series that I have yet to play in full. Huge blind-spot for me. Deeply embarrassing. I’ll get around to it soon, I promise!
“Start Press” is like, a title for a video-game magazine or something. Weird. Maybe something will come of that at some point…
People are always saying I “write about music” on this thing but am I really doing that? I’m not sure what to classify this as!
A bonus note: Go listen to “Hands of the Priestess Pt. 1” by Steve Hackett and tell me what Final Fantasy theme that is! You know it!
all these album covers are so good…….