Lyrically, “Seven Stones” is a meta-narrative of three smaller tales. The first sees a tinker lost in a storm. He finds seven rocks under a pile of leaves, takes it as a sign, and sure enough finds shelter within the seventh house he comes across. The second tale is of a sea captain unknowingly making a beeline for disaster, only to see a single seagull over what appears to be open water. He thinks, “Well that’s odd,” and turns the boat just in case, never knowing for sure that he just saved the lives of everyone on his ship. And the final tale is of an inexperienced farmer trying to buy wisdom, only to have his money taken with no answers. He did buy wisdom in the end, if only the certainty that wisdom can’t be bought.
These stories are pretty different things, but they’re all framed within the song’s lyrics as being told by a singular old man who laughs at grief and grieves at mirth. He’s passing his own brand of wisdom onto the listener, as each story has a different but related moral. The first, that pivotal things can happen totally out of the blue. How unlikely is it that at the exact moment of despair, this tinker finds an apparently meaningful marker on the ground that actually leads him to safety? The second moral is that we can never know what roads other decisions may have led us down. The sea captain didn’t know there was a rock there, and he never truly will. And finally, that our plans are useless. A farmer who doesn’t know when to sow wants to plan his whole crop, but for his trouble is only cheated of his cash, because what answer could the old man possibly give? You make the decision and you live with it.
This is an odd thing for Genesis - well, almost certainly Tony Banks, at any rate - to be writing about, isn’t it? To be sure, they’d by now proven their penchant for fanciful stories and drama that would befit some kind of Age of Legends, but “Seven Stones” isn’t quite that. It’s not a grand tale of kings and betrayal, or a description of a pastoral scene, or even a channeling of a particular emotion. It’s just a kind of proverb, told as a set of proverbs, about how the world is ruled by randomness, and that to an extent simply believing in the power of good fortune can almost will it into existence. Where did this come from? My theory is that it had a lot to do with the uncertainty the band had experienced over the previous year, how much stronger they came out of it, and how outrageously unlikely all of that was. From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genesis/comments/igbbra/hindsight_is_2020_29_seven_stones/
