Despite my dedication to The Moody Blues described with the last entry, I was barely aware they had an album in 1978, “Octave.” Their first album since 1972’s “Seventh Sojourn,” it had two singles, only one of which broke the top 40 and neither of which I can remember even now. I just had no awareness of it. But this one, Long Distance Voyager, broke big and became a No. 1 album in the US after its release in 1981. (“Octave” had gone to no. 13, to my retrospective surprise.) The singles from this one, “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice,” both did well in that summer of ’81.
That summer was a particular summer of despair for me that I’ve written about before. I’m fairly certain I actually didn’t pay this any attention until that autumn, when my spirits eased, I got my act somewhat together, and I was in a space to be receptive to something like this. In fact, at that moment, a new album from the Moodies felt like a visit from an old friend, a breath of fresh air, and indeed this album was a freshening of their sound. Without ever going quite so regrettably far into the new wave sound as some old ’60s bands went in a desperate bid to seem relevant, the Moody Blues did, with the replacement of Mike Pinder and his Mellotron, manage to update their sound credibly, and delivered a really excellent album. I loved it and played it a lot in those last years of college, and for some years after it continued to make the rotation.
When I made the move to CDs, for whatever reason, I never upgraded any of my Moodies albums to CD format. Never picked up (maybe never even saw) a CD version of “This Is,” the record I’d have been most likely to replace, having worn my vinyl copy quite a bit. So as my listening habits went digital, The Moody Blues moved to the background, and as a result I haven’t played this album in a very long time, even as I got very much into their earlier catalog in the past couple of years. That was an error, clearly, as this album is still rock solid, and hugely enjoyable. I’m now going to consciously add it to the rotation when I’m in a Moodies mood.
It happens that this is the kind of conversation I have with my friends, and one of those friends, Rich Wilhelm, wrote about his own experience with this album on the occasion of its 40th anniversary last year – you can find that here.
The band released three more albums in the ’80s, two in the ’90s, and a final album in 2003, but for whatever reason, after Long Distance Voyager, I stopped keeping up with them. I absolutely love “Your Wildest Dreams,” both the song and the video, from 1986’s “The Other Side of Life,” but wasn’t inspired to buy it. Nine albums in my collection puts them right up there with the most important artists in my life, but sometimes enough is enough.
