Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2016

Al Stewart interview

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

On the 40th anniversary of the release of Al’s Year of the Cat album, he was interviewed by “Redbeard” for In the Studio with Redbeard. Unfortunately, I can’t embed the interview, so you’ll have to follow that link to hear a few of Al’s stories and songs (including the time he got backstage to talk to John Lennon in 1963, thanks to a fast-talking friend).

It was a sunny cloudless autumn morning in 1988 outside a modest house high on the hillside above Malibu Beach and the Pacific Ocean. The owner of the house answered my knock still dressed in his bathrobe, vertically striped like Joseph’s biblical coat of many colors. Clearly I had surprised my interview subject with an earlier than anticipated arrival, but Al Stewart grinned and graciously let me invade his Saturday morning tranquility.

al-stewart-in-the-studio-interview

At that time it was only the tenth anniversary of the second of his back-to-back multimillion selling albums, Time Passages, which like its predecessor, 1976’s Year of the Cat, was produced by Alan Parsons just as Parsons launched his own career as a performer. But these mainstream hits by Al Stewart were far from his first attempts, coming instead after making no less than six albums, the first of four of which were practically ignored. Not until 1973’s Past, Present, and Future and “Roads to Moscow”, with its eight minute historically-based first person World War II narrative through the eyes of a young Russian soldier who had repelled the Nazi German tank invasion, did Stewart gain U.S. airplay.

QotD: Depression

Filed under: Books, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The book [In the Jaws of the Black Dogs, (1999)] is a compelling, unpleasant read, valuable because it tells us three things. First, that such depressions do not yield to shrink fixes, and will not otherwise “go away.” Second, that there is no “template,” for each sufferer is his own constellation of symptoms which no outsider is privileged to explore. And thus, third, the depression can be controlled and mastered, only if one grasps these things. One must, as it were, leash one’s own black dogs, and it will be neither easy nor painless. While perhaps overwritten, the book is admirable for containing no victim’s plaint, no false appeal for applause, and absolutely no pop psychology.

David Warren, “Unfinished conversations”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-09-19.

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