Moonlight Shadow

The song today was a huge hit in Europe in 1983. It reached the top of the Norwegian charts, and it is one of my favorite songs from 35 years ago. Mike Oldfield wasn't known to me before this song, and for a while it was the only song I knew of his. That is until my friend Geir let me borrow the album The Complete Mike Oldfield, which was (and still is) one of the most excellent compilation albums I have ever heard, mainly because of the thematic division. On a double vinyl, each section got one side - so you had the instrumental, vocal, complex, and live sections. The complex section was a stroke of genius, as he had a tendency of having at least one major work spanning at least one whole side of the album for his early records, and by finding representative excerpts from them, they were not excluded from consideration based on length alone.

Then I started spending a lot of time with Vegard, another dear friend of mine, and he was a huge fan of Mike Oldfield - and I got even more exposed to his music. And lately, Mike Oldfield has provided a lot of music to play while I work - and while instrumental songs work, today's song, Moonlight Shadow, really gets me going. The singer is Maggie Reilly, and her voice is very distinctive and appears frequently on Mike Oldfield's albums. However, what really gets to me here is the guitar solo. He is a great guitarist - and it isn't necessarily the technical aspects that get me as much as it is the texture he creates in the way he plays around the melody. And then there is his tone. He has a unique guitar tone that just hits me really hard. I can loop this song for a day and not grow tired of it - that is how good I believe it is.