Alone Again Or. Love. 1967. Electra.

 It’s virtually unthinkable that, without the stylistic and influential antecedents of Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, and Blonde On Blonde, we would even have the stunning final arrangement of Alone Again Or as it appears opening Forever Changes. Yet as it plays there’s no doubt in my mind that Alone Again Or, written by L.A. wunderkind Bryan MacLean, eclipses those canonical masterworks, in both beauty and lyric strangeness. The song’s far-reaching ambition helps generate a low-key dramatic suspense that the fiendishly nuanced rhythm section complements while the interplay of guitars, vocals, and strings—arranged by David Angel and called by the Library of Congress “arguably the most distinctive sustained orchestration in rock music history”—formalize a style of sixties baroque pop that would remain peerless until the release of Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter four years on. At the center of Alone Again Or, at its now immutable core, is an empathic sadness first ostensibly expressed on behalf of the fabled young,  lost hordes of Pat Brown’s and Reagan’s California, the hippie castoffs who, less than two years later, would introduce the name Manson into the American vernacular before ushering in the whirlwind madness of the narcissism fueled nineteen-seventies. It is our American mid-past glaringly writ in the pop art font style of myth. Before we learned to recount to ourselves in obsessive, conflicting detail the stories of that late century mythology, Love laid a foundation that told its own unerring tale of melancholy and sympathy in a transitional time out of the past forward into the modern. A tale, we are told, of how painfully forever changes.

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