This time that is upon me, this week, this month, this year, I feel strongly will be a time of departures. Of exits. Of retreats. I feel it in my bones. It may happen this fall. This song, introduced to me sometime in 1988 soundtrack a kind of exit too.
I don't know anything about the background to the song but all the poets and all the bards of yore could not have distilled better the poetry of departure than simply: "I will cry, when you go away."
Every so often I'll discover some new demo from Pete Townshend that he wrote in the early '70s, one he never released at the time, one consigned to Disc 7 of some massive box set from the 2010s that no one bought. Some brilliant piece of tossed off pop, something that lesser songwriters would have killed to have written, but for Townshend, it was nothing, just something forgotten and never released.
Here's 'There's a Fortune in Those Hills,' a parable about an old man's delusions of something better just beyond the horizon. The chord sequences are so beautiful, you forget to breathe as it moves to the next one -- just gorgeous. The arrangements hark back to a lot of the countryfied sensibilities that he seemed to have embraced in that period. Guitar twang and all that. As with all his demos, he plays all the instruments.
I feel such a deep melancholia when the bridge comes on.
