“Time Passages” (Al Stewart)

We finish our look at some of my favorite tracks from the mid-70s with “Time Passages” by Al Stewart. This was the first track on side one of the Time Passages album, Mr. Stewart’s follow-up to his career-defining Year of the Cat album. The “Time Passages” single, released in September of 1978, hit #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts, making it Mr. Stewart’s highest-charting single of his entire career. (The “Year of the Cat” single, as great as it was, only hit #8 on the Hot 100.) Billboard named “Time Passages” the number-one Adult Contemporary track of the entire year 1979.

“Time Passages” was deliberately designed as a radio-friendly follow-up to “Year of the Cat,” even as Mr. Stewart’s overall songwriting was moving into a more literate historical direction. The general flow of the song was constructed to mimic that of “Year of the Cat,” complete with opening piano lick and multiple guitar and sax solos in the middle. It is not as well crafted a song as its predecessor, especially lyrically, but it’s still pretty good—and much more sophisticated than just about anything else on the radio at the time. The lyrics detail the singer’s reflections on his life as he travels homeward on a snowy December day:

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

The rest of the album was equally good, with lots of Al’s historical writing on songs like “A Man for All Seasons” (about Sir Thomas More), “Life in Dark Water” (about the infamous ghost ship, the Marie Celeste), and “The Palace of Versailles” (about the French Revolution). The album included another made-for-radio hit in the form of “Song on the Radio,” which hit #29 on the Hot 100 and #10 on the Adult Contemporary chart. But my favorite tune was the album-ending track, “End of the Day,” which gently detailed the musings of a woman in an unhappy relationship. It’s a killer song with subtle word painting and a sensitive acoustic guitar accompaniment by Peter White.

Time Passages, the album, garnered lots of plays on my Technics turntable at the time, which happened to be my junior year in college at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I had moved out of the dorms by then and was living by myself in a small apartment just outside of town, having just transferred from the music school to the business school. This album helped center me in a time of change. (It’s my third-favorite Al Stewart album, after the earlier Year of the Cat and the later Between the Wars.)