This could really be said about the entire album. XTC had already been around for a while by '87, but Skylarking sent them over the top, gave them that sought-after mainstream success. Were their talent not met halfway by Todd Rundgren's competent production, this album might have faded into the cauldron of derivative Beatles-esque neo-psychedelia popping up at the time.
Actually, on second thought, I don't know if that's entirely true. It might be more accurate to say Rundgren's production enhanced - perhaps sewed together, or punctuated - singer Andy Partridge and band mate Colin Moulding's already burgeoning musical vision. They were the songwriters, after all, the genesis.
Either way, Skylarking is fucking fantastic. The aforementioned collaboration of music and lyrics is well-matched to Partridge's vocal delivery, and will find a listener in just about anyone, and keep them, because this music is not feckless, floppy dribble, not "hippies" dancing in circles, and that's what makes it so good. It's emotionally charged, angry, sometimes frightening, even, in its revelations...humorous too, at moments, but never without the cutting edge of snark.
The off-the hook percussion, the romping, jazz-infused melody, the lyrics serving as a kind of universal indictment of human flaws and frailty, all conspire to make "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" the best musical ambassador for the album. In the song's closing moments, the listener is led on a finger-snapping stroll through the dark woods of consciousness, to one revealing, and horrifying, final three seconds.
Wait for it...wait for it...
#208) "Gentle On My Mind" by Glen Campbell - One of the new American standards that has been covered by countless artists over the years, Glen Campbell's version of "Gentle On My Mind" does the song the most justice, in my opinion. Very "of the time" in which it was written and recorded, it just sounds like afternoon sunshine, although truthfully, it was probably kind of edgy in the late 1960s, for country music at least, addressing divorce and the relief that follows it, and suggesting that marriage may not only be not ideal, but not all that necessary.
It's sad that country music doesn't sound like this anymore. That is, not at all. Today, the genre has become largely a breeding ground for carefully prescribed stereotypes that seem almost unwittingly self-mocking, and leave little room for anything outside the box.
What better "road song" is there, really? What more do or can we expect from a road trip, then for everything to become gentle on the mind, everything to sound like afternoon sunshine?
"I still might run in silence, tears of joy might stain my face, and the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind / But not to where I cannot see you walkin' on the back roads, by the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind..."
