Song 25:
"After Midnight" by Eric Clapton
Peak: 18
Year: 1970
Year end position: NA
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/11
Chronological Songs by Artist: 1/11
Video?: No
Spotify?: Yes
Yesterday, we started to go over a group of songs that are
prepositional phrases that describe a particular time. Much like yesterday's "After All",
the times that those songs will reference are all going to be some non-specific
time. Today's is the rare departure from
that convention. "After
Midnight" has a definite starting point.
It turns out that "Midnight" is probably the most
common time in song titles that we will go over in this blog. There are currently 13 songs that have the
word "Midnight" in the title.
Something I found strange is that all but two of them hit the top 20
prior to 1975. I'm not sure why Midnight
fell so out of favor. Maybe people were
starting to stay up later, so being awake after midnight was no longer a big
deal.
Another angle to look at Midnight songs would lead you to
the conclusion that really four songs are specifically about the time
Midnight. Songs like "Midnight
Blue" aren't so much referring to midnight as a noun, but using it as an
adjective. The four songs that I could
find that used Midnight as a noun are this one, "Midnight at the
Oasis" by Maria Muldaur, "Midnight in Moscow" by Kenny Ball and
"Walkin After Midnight" by Patsy Cline. I had to do some additional research on this,
but the Midnight song I thought of first - "In the Midnight Hour" by
Wilson Pickett only peaked at #21, so never qualified for this blog. That's a shame because that's a really good
song.
After some cursory research, I could only come up with a few
other time specific songs that we are going to go over. "3 AM Eternal" by the KLF is
one. "3 AM" by Matchbox 20 is
another, and "Four in the Morning" by Night Ranger are a third. As far as I can tell, if you add those to the
songs in the previous paragraph, I think we've got a pretty exhaustive
list. Why specific times are not good
names for songs, I can't really say.
Maybe they are too specific to be relatable to everyone. After all, not everyone has had an experience
where they were doing something at midnight or 3 AM.
I feel like I'm somewhat burying the lead on this song. This is the first of 11 Eric Clapton songs to
make to the top 20 both chronologically and alphabetically. That makes him a Hall of Famer on my blog,
and an actual Rock and Roll Hall of Famer in real life. His 11 top 20 hits seem low given his stature
in Rock history. After all, nobody wrote
graffiti that said "Helen Reddy is God" and she had just as many top
20 hits as Eric Clapton. Of course, the
way I am calculating things, his work with Cream and Blind Faith and others is
tracked separately. Plus, a lot of his
work was not necessarily for the pop charts, so the fact that he has had as
much success as he has is a testament to the breadth of his work.
I did not know this, but "After Midnight" was
written by a blues rock pioneer named JJ Cale.
If you'd never heard of him, that was kind of on purpose. He tended to avoid the limelight despite
being a influential to a generation of guitarists from the 70s on. Unfortunately for him, he never hit the top
20 on his own and some of his most
famous songs ("Cocaine" by Eric Clapton and "Call Me the
Breeze" by Lynyrd Skynyrd) didn't make the top 20 either despite being
widely played on classic rock radio.
There isn't much to the lyrics of "After
Midnight". It just sounds like Eric
Clapton is going to a party that really doesn't get going until after
midnight. It's upbeat and fun. It sounds like the kind of party I probably
would have like to have attended in my younger days. The sound of this song almost feels like it
could have come from the Roaring 20s. I
feel like people should be dancing the Jitterbug and the Charleston to this
song. That's a lot of the fun of
it. It's a good time song. No need to take life so serious. Every so often it's nice to just let all hang
down.
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