Fleetwood Mac | Take It Easy

I’m not sure where he got the idea from, but for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that mentions an insect. His post tells all. Naturally, being of my vintage, my thoughts first turned to the wonderfully creepy Boris The Spider by The Who, but I thought that might be chosen by others so I’m leaving it to them. Instead, I’m being my usual indecisive self and, being unable to choose between two songs, I’m playing them both.

Both go back to the Seventies and are from favourite bands, starting with this one:

Ian Anderson at his scary, manic best! And if you need the lyrics, these are they:

Oh the leaded window openedbut you moved the dancing candle flameand the first moths of summersuicidal came, oh suicidal came.

And the new breeze chatteredin its May-bud tendernesssending water-lilies sailingas she turned to get undressed.

And the long night awakenedand we soared on powdered wingscircling our tomorrowsin the wary month of spring.

Chasing shadows slippingin the magic lantern’s lightcreatures of the candleon the night’s light’s rite.

Dipping and weaving,flutter through the golden needle’s eyein our haystack madness,butterfly stroking on a spring-tide high.oh, on a spring-tide-high

Life’s too long (as the lemmings said)as the candle burned and the moths were wed.And we’ll all burn together as the wick grows higherbefore the candle’s dead.

Oh the leaded window openedbut you moved the dancing candle flame.And the first moths of summersuicidal came, oh suicidal came,to join in the worshipof the light that never diesin the moments reflectionof two moths spinning in her eyes.

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Ian Anderson

Moths was a track on Jethro Tull’s eleventh album, Heavy Horses, which was released in April 1978 and is generally considered to be the second in a trilogy of folk-based albums, following 1977’s Songs From The Wood and ahead of 1979’s Stormwatch. With my folkie leanings I would probably say that these are my favourite Tull albums, but there have been many others that I’ve loved too. The album peaked at #20 in the UK, #14 in Canada and #19 in the US, and went Gold in both the US and Canada, and Silver in the UK. This is one of my favourite tracks on the album, but they are all good: the title track is a nearly nine minute masterpiece, and another favourite is One Brown Mouse – if you’re watching, Jim, I think a week of tunes about rodents might be in order! Before writing this I would have said that no singles were taken from this album, but Wikipedia claims that this one was: on further checking it appears that this was only in The Netherlands, and it didn’t chart anyway. It did strike me as a strange choice for a single!

I promised you a second tune for today. If you thought that first one was a little obscure, how about this next one – and this was released as a single! From the band’s ‘interim’ period:

Go on, tell me, how many of you remember Dragonfly? This was a single released by Fleetwood Mac in March 1971, the first they gave us after the departure of Peter Green, who had been part of the band’s name until then. The song was written by guitarist Danny Kirwan, who sings lead vocal. The lyrics are based on a poem by the same name written by W.H. Davies in 1927 – Danny borrowed and rearranged them, then added/subtracted a few bits, to give us a lovely song about the transience and delicacy of the titular insect.

This was also the first release to feature Christine McVie as a full, band member, and represented a move away from the earlier incarnation’s blues rock roots and the first step towards their reinvention as an AOR juggernaut in the mid Seventies. It made #52 in the UK (the ‘bubbling under’ chart), so it appears that I wasn’t the only one to buy it, but wasn’t released as a single in the US until 2014, when a special limited-edition vinyl pressing of 3,000 copies was made for Record Store Day: it sold out, and made #9 on their Hot Singles Sales Chart. The song has never appeared on a studio album but was included on a 1971 Greatest Hits compilation, which reached #36 in the UK. To me, it is a true forgotten gem, and the guy who made the lovely AI video that I’m playing clearly agrees with me. And so did Peter Green, who said it was the best thing Danny ever wrote.

That’s today’s twofer, and I’m off to try to find some football to watch: in a week of international matches that isn’t always easy. Hopefully I’ll be lucky, and hopefully you’ll have a good day too. See you again for Tuesday Tunes? 🎶