It Took Seconds

Five minutes and forty-five seconds: Rotary Connection - “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun”. The first time I heard this song was as the Nu Yorican Soul cover - very faithful indeed, from my memory, the kind of ultra-reverent cover that serves a useful educational purpose. What blew me away about the song was its mystery (from that amazing, evocative title on), and its sense of pride and most of all its scale. Progressive, ever-growing but always returning to and building again from that piano groove. It brings to mind my fantasy idea of boho 1971 - mostly derived from LP sleeve fonts - and my fantasy idea of… well, fantasy, it sounds incantatory, like something a priestess from an intoxicating pulp novel might sing.

Quick procedural note: this was recommended by somebody in the answer box for a post a couple of seconds back, and today Ben G. asked how I determine song lengths. The answer is, since there’s no canonical way of doing so I’m going for internal consistency and just following what my copy of WMP tells me. So for any given record there’s a 1-2 second halo in either direction, but that shouldn’t affect the overall shape of the blog.

What would your 5’45” song have been?