Category: default || By jt3y

If you were around 35 years ago this week and had a radio tuned to "Solid Rock'n Gold" WIXZ (1360) or "Musicradio" KQV (1410), you were hearing this song a lot.

It's a song that some people consider one of the worst pop songs of all time.

I'm talking about Gilbert O'Sullivan's immortal classic, "Alone Again (Naturally)."

I've had it stuck in my head for days. A listener requested it last Sunday night and I played it, and while I wouldn't say it's a favorite, it's really not that bad. In fact, it's pretty damned good. In 2004 a reviewer for the BBC called it "a nugget of three-minute perfection," and O'Sullivan (that was his real last name; his manager dubbed him "Gilbert") really does pack more details and emotion into the record than some novelists fit into a whole book.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the song (I envy you), the singer has just been left at the altar by his fianceé and is being pitied by the people who came to the wedding:

Left standing in the lurch,
At a church with people saying:
"My God, that's tough, she stood him up
No point in us remaining.
We may as well go home."
As I did, on my own:
Alone, again (naturally)

He goes onto run through all of the other "hearts broken in this world," wrapping up with his parents:

I remember I cried when my father died,
Never wishing to hide the tears.
And at 65 years old,
My mother (God rest her soul)
Couldn't understand why the only man
She had ever loved had been taken.
Despite encouragement from me,
No words were ever spoken.
And when she passed away,
I cried and cried all day:
Alone, again (naturally).

("Everyone wants to know if it's and autobiographical song," O'Sullivan said. "Well, the fact of the matter is, I didn't know my father very well, and he wasn't a good father anyway. He didn't treat my mother very well.")

I know it seems like a terribly depressing song, but there's a tongue-in-cheek quality to either the lyrics or the way O'Sullivan delivers them, or possibly both.

Some how we know that O'Sullivan isn't really going to "throw himself off" a building, and he knows he's wallowing in self-pity. But we all occasionally get into a mood where we sit and feel sorry for ourselves.

As the Beeb's unnamed reviewer says, "It sounds sickly and self-indulgent, but Gilbert's skill was using humour and the sweetest melodies to make us swallow the bitterest pills."

The melody really is sweet. The record suffers a little bit from the heavy production that plagues a lot of 1970s pop --- the overdubbed strings, the reverb on O'Sullivan's voice --- but even that's not enough to wreck the pleasantness of the chord changes. Together with the unconventional internal rhymes of the lyrics ("I remember I cried when my father died," or "Couldn't understand why the only man") it's a catchy song.

And man, did it catch on. "Alone Again (Naturally)" was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic (O'Sullivan was Irish); while I don't have any WIXZ charts, according to Jeff Roteman's KQV website, it was the number 1 song on KQV for three straight weeks, finally displaced in the last week of August by Argent's "Hold Your Head Up."

Where "Alone Again (Naturally)" is subtle and novel and creative, "Hold Your Head Up" is about as clever and sensitive as a brick in the face. What a letdown!

At some point, it became fashionable among the rock cognoscenti to dismiss songs like "Alone Again (Naturally)" as "the crap that killed AM radio." But if it hadn't been written in 1972, and if Ben Folds or Wilco or some other favorite of the alt-rock crowd released it today, it would be getting heavy airplay on WYEP-FM and anywhere else pretentious music snobs gather. Pretty soon Volkswagen would have a commercial with "Alone Again (Naturally)" on the soundtrack.

But I digress.

This has nothing particularly to do with the Mon-Yough area, but after all of the heavy, serious topics that have infested the Almanac lately, I thought we needed something light. (Like a song about death and abandonment.)

Besides, it's been stuck in my head for more than a week, and I thought you deserved to live with it for a while.

Pulling stunts like this is why I'm alone, again. (Naturally.)