Proggy goodness, old and new. Well, it's all old, really.

Many thanks to MadCity Music for the new tunes.

I've always meant to investigate Caravan beyond the title track of In the Land of Grey and Pink and a remaster with bonus tracks for $5 was an absolute steal. The Kansas set is a live album. I've heard several songs from it and this is the band in fine form - perhaps at their proggy peak. It's full of energy and twists & turns and is just wonderful. (I wonder if there's overdubs.) I already have Mayhem Symphony, a cleaned-up radio broadcast courtesy of the Progressive Rock Remaster Project, from Pittsburgh on Halloween 1976, but Two for the Show was recorded on the Point of Know Return tour and has some classics from that album.

Listening to J-Tull Dot Com has been fun. It brings back a lot of memories from a time in my life that were a bit like wilderness years. I was single and getting on my feet career-wise. In a sense it was around this time that I really began to mature into an adult. While it's not Tull in full on prog mode, there's a lot of nice riffing from Martin Barre, Andy Giddings continues to bring vitality to keyboards in Tull's sound, and they both getting writing credits here. The flute playing is loud and brash. Plus some of the outtakes are just as good as the material that made it onto the album.

The 2026 remixes are really good. There seems to be more space between the instruments with everything a bit more upfront. Plus I think there's more stereo separation, though I haven't done a thorough comparison.

Song of the day, 28 March 2026

Leftoverture is such a great album. And Kansas put an indelibly American stamp on progressive rock. For all the lies and shit talk about prog lyrics being about hobbits (thanks Jim DeRogatis :/) check this out:

Well, you told me that I was just not the one
And you left me standing out in the cold
It's been a long time and I'm so much better now

That I'm looking back and seeing it all

And for the first time, there's no pain in my life
Been a long hard road that I've gone
We had a good thing
And it made me a man

Did any other prog band sing anything like that, make even a passing reference about maturing into manhood? Great stuff.

A Chronicle From the Closet

I've been listening to Kansas a lot lately, their best-known albums Leftoverture and Point of Know Return. I generally skip "Carry On Wayward Son" as it's one of those staples of classic rock radio that I've grown tired of yet I still listen to "Point of Know Return" and "Dust in the Wind". Go figure.

Kansas often get lumped in with contemporaries like Foreigner and Boston who filled arenas playing melodic hard rock that was a few more steps divorced from the rock's blues roots than their late-60s progenitors. But I think of them as being the American cousins of British symphonic progressive rock.

Last year former member Robby Steinhardt died and I wrote about how I view the band as the Aaron Copeland of progressive rock with their American take on a style of music invented by the British. I noted how their American sounds and lyrics about Native American peoples distinguish them from their peers on the other side of the Atlantic. But there are other lyrics that their proggy influences like Genesis, Yes, and ELP would never have committed to song, at least not until the 1970s were well in the rear view mirror. Take this lovely verse from "Opus Insert":

But there's too many empty lives my friend
And we just can't let them waste away
For this life is a precious thing my friend
And we just can't wait another day

That would never have appeared on a 70s Genesis album and, although it's a sentiment that Jon Anderson would have shared, no Yes lyric would dare express a humanistic statement of empathy this directly.

One song I've really come to enjoy is "Closet Chronicles" from Point of Know Return. I am not sure what the lyrics are about. For me, they depict a Howard Hughes figure as if portrayed by Terry Gilliam. The subject is described as "the king" but he gazes down at the world from the 42nd floor. A captain of industry, perhaps? One day "he journeyed deep into his mind". When he wasn't pondering life's great mysteries, he dreamed.

Daydreams filled his nighttimes
And night dreams filled his days
Confusion and uncertainty
A puzzled mind of haze

 Whatever the song is about, the music is wonderful with plenty of twists and turns.