This week for Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that makes us think about life, as he tells us in his post, Pondering Existential Thoughts. This theme ran previously, in September 2024, when I played you two songs in SLS: To Everything… I’m also playing you two today, but different ones, as there are plenty to choose from!

As I said last Sunday, I have been having trouble with paragraph formatting for my SLS posts, whether I run them in Classic or Block mode, so I experimented with playing lyric videos to meet the request to share the songs’ lyrics – this is Song Lyric Sunday, after all! That seemed to work ok, so I’m doing it again with this week’s pair of tunes. And the beauty of these is that unofficial lyric videos are rarely country-restricted, so I don’t have to worry that you won’t see them. A win-win, I think. But that’s enough waffle, time for some music. Both of these are long time favourites of mine, this first one being the older of them:

Jethro Tull released Life Is A Long Song as the lead song on a five track EP in September 1971, and it reached #11 in the UK Singles chart (we had done away with a separate EPs chart by then). All five tracks were included on the band’s first compilation album, Living In The Past, which came out in June 1972 and peaked at #8 in the UK and #3 in the US. I bought the EP when it was released, but couldn’t resist also adding the album to my collection: it was a real goldmine of their ‘best of’ up to that point, along with some previously unreleased recordings. These five tracks were later included on the 40th anniversary re-release of the Aqualung album in 2011, presumably making up for their omission from the original release.

This week’s theme is songs that make us think about life, and this one has always done that for me. To me, it is about friends offering their support in times when we might be feeling down and in need of help, something I think we all welcome. Sadly, Ian Anderson concludes that the tune (i.e. life) “ends too soon for us all,” with the underlying message that we shouldn’t waste our time – make the most of what we have been given!

Not that I plan these, or anything, but that is also the message of my second tune for today:

Wasted On The Way was released in June 1982 on Crosby Stills and Nash’s third album as a trio, Daylight Again, which peaked at #8 in the US but didn’t make the UK charts. It was the first single taken from the album and reached #9 in the US, again not making it here. It is a lovely album, well worthy of its Platinum award in the US, if only because it contains my all time favourite CSN song, Southern Cross. Wasted On The Way was written by Graham Nash, who said in an interview around that time with Songfacts that “We had wasted a lot of time arguing with each other and debating how we should do this or do that, and that’s what I wanted to say: We wasted a lot of time. CSN&Y only did what, three albums? We had wasted a lot of time, and I just wanted to make my partners realise that.” Songfacts also tells us that “David Crosby was, in fact, ‘wasted’ around this time, a point disc jockeys often made when playing the song. His drug abuse got really bad in the late ’70s and was an issue when they recorded this song in late 1980 and early 1981. He was arrested for freebasing cocaine in 1982 just a few months before the song was released. Crosby only sobered up after spending much of 1986 in jail, which he says probably saved his life.”

Having decided to play lyric videos I am perhaps depriving myself of the joy of sharing a wonderful live performance by the three of them from 1989, after Crosby had got himself well again. The sheer delight they share in playing together is wonderful:

Never let it be said that I shortchange you! Isn’t that fantastic?

That’s my two for today. As always, I hope you enjoyed them, and I give my thanks to Jim for running this great show. I’e already read some of the early posts that have been made today, and the variety of choices is, as always, great to see.

Have a lovely day, and I hope to see you again for Tuesday Tunes. Take care 😊