#4 is now up!

Interesting that “Time of the Season” seems the outstanding song for you. The record company idiotically released the grating anti-war song as the first single. To my mind, “This Will Be Our Year,” is the most hit-possible standout, although “Brief Candles,” “Beechwood Park,” and even the cursory “Hung up on a Dream,” seem the most representive of the album’s sentimental loveliness. And “Rose for Emily” keeps growing on me.

Even with your excellent account of this album, I am not persuaded of the importance of “Odyssey and Oracle” (whether in a formalistic, aesthetic or historical manner), but then there are other albums considered to be great “concept” albums, like the Kinks’ “Something Else” (I love the Kinks, nut not that one), to which I also remain tone deaf.

I think you are right that in terms of the songs on “Odyssey and Oracle” there is a build up to the conclusion of “Time of the Season.” It may be that this song seems to offer a false resolution of the problems the earlier songs–in your interpretations (which seem plausible to me).

Your discussion of “Friends of Mine” and the “unwillingly single, the gay, the spurned, the childless, the divorced, and the widowed” is truly evocative of the sense of the whole album. But the sentiment of “Time for the Season” rings false when it is confronted with such partial and alienating situations.

“Changes” shows a regret in the loss of simplicity for diamond-studded hipness. You were right to point to “Caroline, No”–but in making that allusion you show (in my mind) the superiority to the Beach Boys. That song, unlike “Changes” is inherently melancholic or nostalgic–what with its minor key, but also the sadness that golden hair has when it shines in the sunset of a California coast. All that glitters…and all that.

“Changes” shows the difference between the earlier and later girl as a process of “socialization” (as the sociologists would put it), whereas “Caroline, No” compares the present “bad” Caroline to the imagined “good” Caroline from the perspective of an indelibly stamped memory. It reminds me of the effect that the memory of swimming with a youthful Anne Stanton had on Jack Burden’s character and belief in RPW’s “All the King’s Men.” His belief regarding Anne was “trapped in amber,” and it made for a certain naivete which was ultimately lethal even if beyond his power to stop.

Anyway, I look forward to your account of the artistic failure of “Odyssey and Oracle.”

In the meantime, what is the difference between the oracle and the odyssey, and how do they play out on this album? Also, I look forward to Damon-esque accounts of the music too–if you wish to go there.