Sunday 3 February 2013

The Musical Box (Genesis, 1971)

This is the first prog song I ever listened to and I still adore it. I don't think there's someone out there who doesn't know this track by heart, so I'm not going to describe or explain it. I just mention it's the first track of the album "Nursery Cryme", a collection of great prog songs and an established standard in this genre. The strange lyrics of "The Musical Box" - somewhere between horror, nonsense and superatural - also inspire the well known album cover by Paul Whitehead. What about the music? There's everything here: melody and romance, rock and umpredictability and most of all a perfect balance... I had to listen ten times to understand and love this. Well, I'm not a clever guy...

 
Paul Whitehead's cover for "Nursery Cryme".


All the instruments have their proper space in this song, and you feel this is a group playing, not just five musicians. Not so common, you know. Finally, I just want to add this: "The Musical Box" taught me how deep emotions music can give to the listener and then I also learned how important is to spend some time in search of this kind of music.

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