‘The Last Time We Ever Met . . .’

Well, not to complain too much – I’m upright – but I’ve had better Mondays: A sinus infection came crashing down on me over the weekend. It snowed lightly overnight, which is no big deal, but it’s a reminder that we’re supposed to get somewhere between twelve and twenty inches from a storm between Tuesday and Thursday this week. And I am utterly bereft of ideas to fill this space today. 

So I’m going to rely on a method I used fairly often during the fifteen years I wrote a music blog. I’m going to open my iTunes stash and click randomly five times to see what we get. (My iTunes has about 2,500 tracks in it as opposed to the main music library, which comes in at about 88.000 tracks.) 

So here goes: First of all, we get “The Unknown Solider,” a vaguely anti-war record that was a No. 39 hit for the Doors in 1968. Our second stop is Boz Scagg’s “I’ll Be Long Gone,” a track from Scagg’s first solo album, released in 1969. We move on to an instrumental version of the tune “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” from the soundtrack to the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. (The track was considered as a backing for the film’s main titles but wound up not being used in the film; it showed up as a bonus track on the 2003 CD release of John Barry’s soundtrack.) From there, we jump to the Grass Roots’ “Sooner or Later,” which went to No. 9 in 1971. 

And then we find our feature for the day: Phil Collins’ atmospheric “In The Air Tonight.” According to a 2016 Rolling Stone piece (cited at Wikipedia), the song expressed the grief Collins felt after divorcing his first wife Andrea Bertorelli in 1980. “Collins said of the song’s lyrics: ‘I wrote the lyrics spontaneously. I’m not quite sure what the song is about, but there’s a lot of anger, a lot of despair and a lot of frustration’.” 

The record is recognizable from its first moments, and as I look in my reference library, I’m surprised that it went no higher than No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and didn’t even touch the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart at all. I wasn’t blown away by the record in 1981, but since I pulled it into iTunes from the main files, I must like it well enough.