AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote this on February 8, 2021, a bit longer than a year ago, . I left it unpublished because I disliked it–thought it was moistened garbage. Still don’t love it, but I gotta stop being fussy. If I went to the trouble of writing it, it should be read. I’ll simply strive to write something better next time.

I have entered the terminal stage of nostalgia while in COVID lockdown. From this point forward, it’s 25 to 30 years (one hopes) of slow-rolling, smiling-through-tears melancholia—choking up at selfless gestures, weeping through pitbull rescue videos and Ted Lasso, tightly hugging old friends until they chuckle “ohhhhhkay!” and wriggle out. At least once a day my gaze softens and drifts into the middle distance, and I wistfully shake my head even if no one’s there to see it. I can’t help myself.

This is, as you’d expect, a product of mellowed age. In a little more than a week now I’ll be 54 years old. It’s beginning to show on me in ways I never expected. There’s something to be said for the day you discover gray hair in your eyebrows. It’s not a good something. And a still, small voice inside of me insists that those grays wouldn’t be there, that my eyebrows would be as uniformly dark and authoritative and oh-so-sexy as they were when I was in my 20s, if I wasn’t digesting the anxiety and grief that quite naturally comes with being confined to your home by a death-dealing pandemic.

Part of me will always wonder how much these two loser years have aged us all. But at the same time, I knew I was going to get old someday, and I feel fortunate to be doing so, even confined to quarters like this. These bouts of sentimentality and nostalgia—what amounts to whole-body emotions for the middle-aged—are probably my body’s way of saying “You dumb fuck, keep wearing your mask–and someday you can be nostalgic for these lockdown years, too.”

Anyway, let’s talk about Al Stewart. He’s a Scottish singer-songwriter, ostensibly a folkie (I’ve heard no evidence to support that), with a singing voice so adenoidal that it’s hard to believe he’s not pinching his nose shut through “Year of the Cat” (1976) and “Time Passages” (1978). I always imagined him as a bearded, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam type, so you can imagine my surprise when I Googled him and discovered he had a whole Dudley Moore thing going on.

I wish I could tell you that I researched him for an assignment, but the truth is that “Year of the Cat” popped up in a friend’s Spotify mix, and as it sometimes happens with songs I’ve known for decades, I heard it with both ears for the first time. Nostalgia, you see. An old song reminds you of a feeling, and if it’s a good feeling you’re inclined to ride it for as long as you can. The first time it happened to me was in Seattle, maybe 14 or 15 years ago now, when Madonna’s “Crazy for You” came up in shuffle as I took the bus home from work; by the time we crossed the Fremont Bridge I was in tears. What it brought back wasn’t a memory of an event or a person, but the memory of a feeling I used to have. I remembered what it felt like to fall in love as a teenager, before my heart was made suspicious and obstinate. I remembered the contours of ecstatic, heedless, dumb love, and it felt so dreamy and tremendous that I had to weep it out.

I didn’t get that feeling from “Year of the Cat.” In researching the soft-rock stalwart I learned that it’s a gauzy, obliquely racist accounting of an vacation hookup. (I also learned that Al Parsons produced it, a scant three years after he put his stamp on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Funny old world.) I won’t quote the lyrics here, because I kinda hate them, but I will give Stewart credit for name-checking Peter Lorre in a song people probably fucked to in hot tubs.

Having said all that, I have to say that the song’s instrumental break is lovely, incorporating lush strings, liquid guitar and the second-best sax solo of its era, behind Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.” It took me back to my childhood bedroom, circa winter 1979, when I first got into a habit of falling asleep to the radio. (These days, it’s podcasts.) I must have heard “Year of the Cat” a couple dozen times while in that hypnagogic state, stripping the lyrics and meaning from the song and assigning it colors, shapes and emotions. Whenever I was awake enough to process what I was hearing, I would imagine how good it would feel to be an adult—to live in a big city, maybe even hold hands with a girl as we walked together on wet streets against a backdrop of cinematic bokeh.

In that my heart has not changed, and I dearly wish I could I could reach out to my younger self in those half-awake moments and tell him that he’s gonna be just fine. Eventually, he’ll live in not one, but two big cities, walk on rainswept streets, have all the freedom he could ever want and meet a strong, clever girl with a lovely face, whip-smart sense of humor and décolletage that just won’t quit.

I get paid to write about music sometimes, which stresses me out because I firmly believe that I’m fucking terrible at it. I have very little practical education in music and can’t read a note of the stuff. (Truly, you’d be shocked how many professional music writers can scarcely sing in the shower, let alone play a single chord on the guitar.) I was years late in arriving at punk rock, only jumping into the pit after its first adherents had had children and grandchildren; and I’m both ashamed and happy to say that I’m still parsing Bowie’s catalog years after his death. Perhaps other music writers have noticed how bad I am, but they’re not about to say jack shit to me about it now that I’m an assignment editor.

I never wanted to write about music in the first place, at least in any way that involved qualitative judgements. I get that now. I now understand that the music pieces I’ve always wanted to write are about how music makes me feel. The music I fall in love with gets into me and unlocks boxes, compartments and oubliettes, releasing this and that. Some of the truest, most honestly emotional writing I’ve done usually begins with me listening to a song. It just happens that way, even if it’s a crappy song like “Year of the Cat.”