#Love #Arthur Lee #Bryan MacLean #psychedelic rock #folk rock #acid rock #psychedelic folk #garage rock #1960s
“Alone Again Or” must be one of pop music’s more enigmatic song titles. But it’s always struck me as a title in search of an ellipsis. Perhaps “Alone Again Or…”, “Alone Again…Or”, or maybe even “Alone Again…Or?” might have made more sense. But whether or not you feel the title deserves those little dots in there somewhere, I hope you can agree that “Alone Again Or” is a tremendous song. Recorded in the summer of 1967, by a group called Love…itself something of an appropriate name for the Summer of Love…couldn’t have chosen a better time for their part-folk, part-rock, part-psychedelia, part-Latin song to chime with the popular mood. Rolling Stone magazine included “Alone Again Or” in their listing of the top 500 songs of all time…and that’s probably about right for a song that captures the spirit of the late 1960s so well. “Alone Again Or” does something very clever, though. It captures the spirit of the time without being too much of the time. It’s a song of love and loss that frankly could have been written at just about any time in musical history. Yet it captures the musical influences swirling around the LA music scene in the late 1960s perfectly. Not just for the wide range of influences apparent in the song itself…folk, rock, psychedelia and Latin to name just a few…but even in the way the song was mixed. Songwriter Bryan MacLean’s Spanish-style guitar comes firmly out of your right speaker and the drums that set the pace throughout the song come firmly out your left speaker. In the early days of stereo recordings this was something people liked to do…partly just because they could, and partly because artists and producers wanted to show off that they’d used this new-fangled stereo technology to make a record. People quickly tired of that and nowadays it would be almost unthinkable to mix a song this way, but “Alone Again Or” is one of the small number of hit records which was, another way in which the song is so very reminiscent of the late 1960s. From: https://nowordsnosong.medium.com/alone-again-or-love-4bdd3366f104
