So, true confessions. I loved The Moody Blues in my college years – but despite that, I didn’t grab up everything they ever issued. Hardly anything, in fact. I had the incredibly well-done compilation “This Is The Moody Blues,” and a lot of what was on that covered what I thought I wanted to hear from some of the albums. I never owned the legendary “Days of Future Passed” on vinyl, in part because it was a little concept-y and I didn’t think I’d necessarily listen to it that much. When records are competing for limited dollars of an undergrad, playability is a key consideration. I had a single of “Nights In White Satin,” and with that, “Tuesday Afternoon” and the spoken “Late Lament” all represented on “This Is,” I didn’t really feel the need to give that one a try until many years later when I got it digitally.
Similarly with In Search of The Lost Chord, their 1968 release that’s a bit of a concept album. Also represented by four tracks on “This Is,” (“Ride My See-Saw,” “The Actor,” “The Word,” and “Legend of a Mind”), it never felt urgent to spend any money to get the rest of the record, despite it being a delightfully spacey odyssey. But I found a lovely reissue back in that first summer of lockdown (2020) on one of my journeys to Matones, in beautiful condition, and decided to run up to Collegeville expressly to grab it. Glad I did, it’s really worth listening to the entire thing as a piece.
I picked up several other Moodys albums that summer, some duplicates that were just in better shape than my old beat-up copies, and as much as I was having a Melanie period in the summer of the pandemic starting, I was having a Moody Blues summer too.
And I really love the album, it’s a cosmic delight.
The cover art remains as spooky and slightly disturbing as ever.
