Music of the Day, 30 April 2025
now's the time to ask the reason
Today’s MotD is courtesy of a couple of questions that wouldn’t leave me alone until I tracked them down. Fortunately, I knew which band’s discography to hunt in and even narrowed it down to the correct album with my first guess.
I can’t remember the last time I listened to We Can’t Dance, which is a pity. It got a lot of attention when I first bought it in 1992, but it’s a sprawling thing, clocking in at 75+ minutes over 12 tracks.1 My general sense is I like nearly all of it, but I’m mystified as to why the radio station in my mind fixated on “Way of the World” so intently that those questions interrupted my work.
They are, “Why is there blue sky? Why is there red sky?” And they don’t really have a lot of meaning in the song itself, unless I’m missing something. But then I’m also not entirely sure that I grok the lyrics; some of them could be interpreted as being straightforward or sarcastic.
Hearing it today, “Way of the World” is a pleasant enough song, but not a standout Genesis track for me. Mike Rutherford’s tasty but subtle bass work makes the repeated listens much more enjoyable. Since my focus has already been shattered, I’m seriously tempted to pull We Can’t Dance from my music library and listen to it while I do some knitting.
if memory serves, I also had to listen on the down low, as my then-husband wasn’t fond of “Jesus He Knows Me”