Days of Future Passed is the second studio album by English progressive rock band the Moody Blues, released on 17 November 1967, by Deram Records. It has been cited by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and others as one of the earliest albums of the progressive rock genre and one of rock music's first concept albums.
The album represents a significant creative turning point for the band. The album is their first with guitarist and singer Justin Hayward, who replaced Denny Laine, and bassist John Lodge, who replaced Clint Warwick. The album is also their first to feature longtime producer and collaborator Tony Clarke and the first to feature keyboardist Mike Pinder on Mellotron. These changes, combined with a shift away from R&B covers toward original compositions and a thematic concept, helped define the band's sound for the next several albums and earned the group new critical and commercial success. The album was recorded to showcase the stereo recording techniques of Decca Records' new imprint, Deram. The label had requested the group record covers of pop and classical music along with an orchestra. Instead, the album features original compositions expressing the day in a life of an everyday person, interspersed with orchestral interludes arranged and conducted by Peter Knight and performed by the London Festival Orchestra.
The album was a moderate success upon release, but steady FM radio airplay and the success of hit single "Nights in White Satin", led the album to become a top ten US hit by 1972. It has since been listed among the most important albums of 1967 by Rolling Stone.
Background The Moody Blues had started out as a rhythm and blues band, and had achieved commercial success in late 1964/early 1965 with the UK No.1 and US Top 10 single "Go Now". However, by late 1966, they had run into financial difficulties and personnel changes; as such, the band decided to change their creative course. Guitarist/singer Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick left the group to pursue other interests, allowing John Lodge, former bandmate and friend of Ray Thomas, to join the group on bass. The band would find guitarist and singer Justin Hayward through Eric Burdon of the Animals who had put out an advert for a new bandmember and passed on the responses he had rejected. The addition of Lodge and Hayward brought two additional songwriters into the group, allowing the band to pursue a new creative direction, which included writing about what they knew, rather than about American themes when they had not yet visited America. After a complaint about the poor quality of their R&B covers, the band focused on their own materialPowell, Mark. Liner notes essay, 2006 Days of Future Passed SACD Deluxe Edition.
One element of the group's new musical direction was the use of the Mellotron. The Mellotron is a keyboard instrument where each key plays a tape loop of a recording of another instrument, chorus, or orchestra. Developed by the West Midlands company Streetly Electronics in the early 1960s, the instrument served as a precursor to sampling keyboards and synthesizers. Mike Pinder, a previous employee of Streetly, used his connections to purchase one of the instruments for the group at a reduced price. An October 1967 Sunday Mirror article gives the price of the band's Mellotron at £1,300, which was paid for by an air conditioning business millionaire, Derek McCormick. Though the instrument could prove fickle in concert, Pinder's experience allowed him to overcome any challenges. He converted the rhythm keyboard into a copy of the 12 second tape loop solo keyboard, so he could continue playing the second keyboard while the tape loop on the first reset. The instrument's ability to reproduce orchestral string sounds in the studio and in concert paired well with Ray Thomas' flute, which he had recently adopted in place of harmonica. Edge reflects on three distinct developments that drove the band's change in sound and creative development: "I think it was three different forces coming together. One was Tony Clarke, the producer. The other was the Mellotron, which Mike Pinder was playing. And the other was Justin Hayward joining the band, because he didn't come the rock 'n' roll route, he came the English folk route. So his feel for chord structure was just that little bit different."
Writing
In October 1966, the group relocated to Mouscron, Belgium to write new material and embark on a Belgian tour. Their shows typically consisted of two sets, the first consisting of rhythm and blues covers including "Go Now" and the second consisting of newly written original songs. Lodge says, "We loved playing together. It was really good. It was exciting when it was our own songs, we weren't playing a song someone had written for us. So every part of every song we'd invented ourselves. We wanted to play each part exactly right and new and like no one else had ever played that particular part to a song before. That was exciting about Days of Future Passed, creating something that no one else ever created before. That gave a great feeling." Lodge continues, "We went to a little village in Mouscron to start writing our own songs and we wrote a lot of songs before Days of Future Passed. But Days of Future Passed dictated its own album, really. When we knew what we wanted to do with Days of Future Passed, we dedicated the songwriting to exactly that album. And everything we did before was just left alone.
Graeme Edge remembers, "We designed a stage show which was going to be '24 hours': daylight 12 and night 12, and we had "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights" and I think "Peak Hour" all written for that." Lodge continues, "Ultimately, it was agreed that the record would be a concept album tracking a day in the life of Everyman, with original songs relating to different parts of the day performed in chronological order, introduced and interspersed with orchestral music. Considering that all five members of the group wrote material for the album prior to the concept being established, it's remarkable how seamless the execution of it was." Pinder explains the desire for a cohesive theme, "I had always wanted to create something that was conceptual. I loved the works of Mantovani. I wanted to have our albums on people's shelves...albums that people would want to collect, and play in their entirety."
Keyboardist Mike Pinder wrote "Dawn Is a Feeling" and Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin", which served as early bookends for the concept. Hayward explains, "Nights In White Satin" had been recorded quite a long time before it was for Days of Future Passed. "Nights In White Satin" and "Dawn Is A Feeling" were the two key songs that gave us the idea of the story of a day in the life of one guy, and that's what our stage show was about before Days of Future Passed was mentioned or thought about. So we had those two times of the day and the idea, then it was just a question of grubbing different times of the day to write about; it was quite frivolous, really ... nothing really too serious. I just put my hand up for the afternoon. So I ended up with "Tuesday Afternoon", and Ray Thomas wrote "Twilight Time".
Mike Pinder's "Dawn is a Feeling" opens the concept with a sense of optimism. Its lyrics acknowledge the spirit of the ongoing Summer of Love and embrace the feeling that society was approaching a new sense of enlightenment, a new spirituality.Moerman, Mark J. "Michael Pinder: One Step into the Light". Higher and Higher. Issue 3. Autumn 1984. Lodge remembers the song as a step in a new direction for the group, and for Pinder's songwriting: "I would think it was like an awakening for him as well. He wanted to be a creative writer. Mike wrote fabulous songs. There's something special about the morning. And I think that was the dawning of the Moody Blues, really."
The whimsical "Another Morning" was written by flautist Ray Thomas. Lodge remembers, "He sang me the song. Ray plays flute and harmonica. He doesn't play any chordal instruments. And so I remember him singing the song to me. And I remember getting the guitar out and playing it with him in the house. Ray has got this wonderful smiley attitude to life. It's a childlike look on life, which is really nice."
Bassist John Lodge remembers the inspiration for "Peak Hour": "I wrote "Peak Hour" in the back of a truck. We were coming back from a gig and the rhythm of the wheels on the tarmac were giving a very strong rhythm. I was pounding my foot on the floor and I said to Graeme, 'Could you keep this tempo up for about three minutes? I think I've written a song.'" He continues, "That's where I basically wrote it. I got the main part, the rock and roll part of it, from there. And worked out the bass part. But I really wanted to do something different in the song. That's why I broke it into a cathedral choir-type part in the middle. So it could build back up into a rock and roll song. One part of it would go up-tempo and then it stops and becomes really really quiet with the organ sounds and then it starts again rock and roll."Chambers, Casey. Interview - John Lodge (The Moody Blues). June 25, 2021. The College Crowd Digs Me.
Hayward recalls writing "Tuesday Afternoon": "I was a little hung up with doing tempo changes in the middle of songs. If I got bored, in order to open up another door within the song, I wanted to just go to a different type of mood. In fact, "Tuesday Afternoon" was the first time we did that. I knew by then, by the time I had written "Tuesday Afternoon", that we were going to do this stage show that was based on a day in the life of one guy, even before we recorded the album. I already had "Nights in White Satin", and we were already starting to learn that and play it. But there was a gap in this story of the day, so I went down to my parents' house in the west country, and I had a dog called Tuesday at the time. Not that the dog is in the song, in any way. I smoked a little joint on the side of a field with a guitar, and that song just came out." He continues, "It was just about searching for some kind of enlightenment or some kind of religious or psychedelic experience in life. I didn't really mean it to be taken too seriously, but six months later, there it was: Our first single in America."
Lodge explains the theme of "(Evening) Time to Get Away": "It's really about, if you can achieve something every day, it doesn't matter how small it is, it just gives you that energy to carry on and have an enjoyable life. Concerning "The Sun Set" and "Twilight Time", Lodge remembers, "We were trying to make sure that every song on the album had a different aspect. That was the most important thing. That every song on the album, no one could say, 'Oh, that sounds like that.'"
Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin" about the changes between one relationship and another, using bedsheets as a metaphor. He remembers the inspiration: "I was the end of one big love affair and at the beginning of another. When you're just 20, as I was, that's quite important in your life. A girlfriend had given me white satin sheets... It was a lovely romantic gesture, and that's what I thought of it. I came home one night after a gig, and sat on the side of the bed, and a lot of these thoughts came out.