AL STEWART : LOVE CHRONICLES

  1. In Brooklyn
  2. Old Compton Street Blues
  3. The Ballad of Mary Foster
  4. Life and Life Only
  5. You Should Have Listened to Al
  6. Love Chronicles
    Bonus Tracks :
  7. Jackdaw
  8. she follows her own rules
  9. fantasy

Label : Collectors' Choice Music

Release Year : September 1969

Length : 52:05

Review (AllMusic) : Al Stewart's second album is most renowned for the 18-minute title track, an autobiographical recount of different love affairs with guitar by Jimmy Page. That track was also quite controversial for its day in its use of the word "f*cking" at one point in the lyrics, though that's not typical of the tone of the composition. It's actually not the best of the six songs on the record, which saw Stewart wisely discard the orchestration of his debut in favor of fairly straight-ahead folk-rock backing. "Ballad of Mary Foster" is Stewart's best early song, as a two-part suite neatly divided between brusque cynical commentary on a bourgeois English family and the introspective musings of the ravaged wife. That second part bears considerable similarity in melody and tempo, incidentally, to sections of the far more famous Stewart song "Roads to Moscow." The rest of the album has additional solid vignettes in the standard gentle yet detached Stewart mold, the best of them being "Life and Life Only," which exploits his knack for insistent, repetitive minor-keyed hooks.

Review (Wikipedia) : Love Chronicles is the second studio album of Scottish folk artist Al Stewart, released in September 1969. It was his first album to be released in the US (and was also the only one of his first four albums). Among the supporting musicians were Jimmy Page and four members of Fairport Convention: bassist Ashley Hutchings, guitarist Simon Nicol (listed as "Simon Breckenridge"), drummer Martin Lamble (as Martyn Francis) and guitarist Richard Thompson (listed as "Marvyn Prestwick"). The songwriting is generally stark. Love Chronicles was released in the UK as part of a double album To Whom It May Concern, which is an anthology of Stewart's first three albums. In 2007, Love Chronicles was issued for the first time on CD with some bonus tracks.