![]() ![]() The familiar final line to the chorus is, "Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight". Billboard magazine also ranked "Time Passages" as the No. Billboard Easy Listening chart, the longest stay at number one on this chart in the 1970s. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December 1978, "Time Passages" also spent ten weeks at No. It was produced by Alan Parsons and is the title track of Stewart's 1978 album release. " Time Passages" is a 1978 US Top Ten hit song by singer-songwriter Al Stewart. Want to hear more Al Stewart? Check out "Year of the Cat," a song that (on certain commercial levels) inspired "Time Passages.1978 single by Al Stewart "Time Passages" Bending straight lines into cycles, sometimes by choice and sometimes by chance, we can see our lives for what they are. Their meanings wrap around other in some phantom logic that defies temporal borders they produce a hypertextual narrative that makes sense only to me.Įven without a literal ability to travel through time, songs like Al Stewart's "Time Passages" suggest that we can connect ourselves to a reality that resides outside of the everyday, that we can encounter some synchronicity beyond seemingly random moments. For reasons that only I can really grasp, these moments are connected, even beyond apparent similarities. I remember walking alone on a Nevada desert highway, my daughter waiting in the car a half-mile up the road. I remember walking the railroad tracks in Dunedin with my best friend, scrounging up two quarters for ice cream at McDonalds. ![]() I remember taking a road trip with my father, listening to him explain that a quarter in his hand represents an investment in my college education. Even now, writing this on a couch next to an open window, hearing a neighbor's dog bark, enjoying a cool breeze of a July afternoon, I find myself able to slip back and forth between incommensurate experiences. He was simply talking about the way that memory blurs places and times into a personally coherent universe, one that would appear paradoxical to anyone else. Listening to "Time Passages" almost three decades later, I'm certain that Stewart meant something less literal. I'd read about it, and I seen it visualized in television shows and movies, and yet I'd never heard it so cleverly suggested in a pop song. You reach out to touch her, "But you're all alone." Thinking back to when I first heard the song at age ten, I imagine myself uttering an audible "whoa." You see, I'd been raised on science fiction, so I immediately assumed that Stewart was singing about time travel. "You" are part of a crowd that is filled with laughing people and loud music. And yet he finds himself slipping into something cyclical when his "line gets cast into these time passages." He wants to hop back onto some familiar continuum, refraining, "Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight," but you begin to wonder if - like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim - he's become unstuck in time.Īnd then as "the picture is changing," the listener assumes the role of the protagonist. He imagines his life as an arrow that connects past to future. Without too much detail, the song relates the story of a man reflecting upon his precarious position within time. And then I noticed the lyrics that swirled around a peppy-orchestral confection produced by Alan Parsons (of course). In contrast to the silly disco songs that marked the last gasp of that strange decade, "Time Passages" sounded thoughtful and even a little sad. Moreover, his song sounded different from most of the music I heard in those days. But Al Stewart sounded plainly and unapologetically British (though he is Scottish). Only when being interviewed do they reveal their nationalities. hits sound almost indistinguishable from stateside artists. ![]() Initially I was struck by how genuinely unique it was to hear a real foreign accent on the radio. I was ten years old when "Time Passages" hit the airwaves (ahh, that explains it), and I quickly connected with its quirky message. Heck, even Al Stewart claims not to like the song. Sure, "Time Passages" was an AM staple in 1978, but the song is precious and pretentious enough to garner sarcastic clucks from music critics today. To them, "Time Passages" is a regrettable throwback to the seventies era of "singer-songwriters" who crafted seemingly self-indulgent folk-pop narratives while (apparently) snorting all manner of dubious powders and convincing themselves that, yes, people will love listening to bittersweet ballads about love and loss and memory because no one had ever written about that before. I'll admit it: I love Al Stewart's 1978 song, "Time Passages." Such an admission must make me look silly to music snobs who generally dismiss the song as hackneyed and trite. ![]()
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