[simpson96]

*music ping*

[Red Badger]

Have Year of the Cat..................

[trisham]

Wow! I remember that song. :)

[Dilbert San Diego]

I remember Al Stewart. Is he still around?

Alan Parsons was the producer? The same guy from The Alan Parsons Project?

[nesnah]

On my iPod and played frequently. Good stuff.

[PGalt]

One of my all-time favorite songs...the reference to Casablanca...(one of my all-time favorite movies)...they lyrics...the mood set...(falling in love)....the variety of instruments...that alto sax...INCREDIBLE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aybGztyFwHk

[Fester Chugabrew]

My wrists grow limp every time I hear it.

[meowmeow]

Eisenhower Years is a great song. I love Year of the Cat as well.

[BlueLancer]

I have every one of Al Stewart's albums ...

A history lesson in almost every song ...
Roads to Moscow
Trains
Night Train to Munich
The Last Day of June 1934
Eisenhower Years
Old Admirals
The Running Man
... and many others too numerous to list ...

[fidelis]

There's a great video on YouTube where Stewart tells how the song came to be. The song as was originally written went nowhere, and his music career was at a similar stand-still.

He had a chance encounter with Paul Simon who gave him some song-writing pointers. He re-wrote the song, re-recorded it and the rest in history. He concludes by saying that this one tune has basically kept a roof over his head all these years.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I didn’t know Peter White played on that album or co-wrote Time Passages. I’ve got several of his guitar releases over the past 25 years. He’s a superb guitarist.

[OrangeHoof]

I was a huge Al Stewart fan back in college but I couldn’t resist a parody version of the song called “Drug Messages”.

“A girl comes towards you you once used to know
You reach out your hand, but your all alone in those
Drug Messages
I know you’re in there, you’re just out of sight..”

[SamAdams76]

Thank you for posting, those two late 1970s albums were pure perfection (YOC and Time Passages). Of course. They were both produced by Alan Parsons (who also produced "Modern Times" for Al Stewart).

Some deride this type of music - which fits perfectly into the Yacht Rock genre - but it evokes a lot of nice memories for me. In particular, a crush in a girl I had at the time in high school.

Now that I have unlimited streaming for $10 a month, I've been slowly discovering the rest of the Al Stewart catalogue - which is quite solid.

Another artist I've been re-discovering through streaming is A-ha, the Norwegian band best known for "Take On Me" in 1985. They had a string of brilliant albums that never took hold in the U.S.

[FreedomPoster]

Huge fan of Roads to Moscow and On the Border as well because of their historical basis along with the music.

[Fiji Hill]

Al Stewart is certainly one of a kind. Not many rock stars choose to sing about Basque terrorism, Hitler’s purge of Ernst Röhm and his followers, Sputnik I or the Soviet Gulag.

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Great voice and wonderful songs about being human. “Lord Grenville” was my favorite.