Moody Blues – To Our Children’s Children’s Children
Possibly inspired by the moon shots of 1969, To Our Children’s Children’s Children is an interesting musical document of awe and wonder, and you can hear Hayward and Lodge turning over in their minds the implications of that decade-defining triumph of technology and determination. That rebirth of wonderment and subsequent wrestling with the realization that this triumph could be used for either good or ill is very much the theme of the album, starting with the cacophonous opening of “Higher And Higher”, evoking the sound of a rocket launch (or is that a bomb blast?) from up close and even featuring processed spoken vocals that could conceivably remind one of voices transmitted from space.
“Eyes Of A Child” furthers this theme by appearing twice on the album, in radically different forms. The first treatment is gentle and, sonically, appropriately childlike and quite relaxing. The second version is faster-paced, heavy with electric guitars, and filled with a somewhat more mature, one might even say rebellious, energy – and yet it’s the same song.. I thought that was a fascinating concept, and the Moodies did it just enough to avoid it being too repetitive. “I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Hundred” and “I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Million” provide another – somewhat opposite – set of matching bookends.
“Beyond” is a rousing instrumental with a dreamy, ethereal middle section, and leads directly into a quartet of some of the best material the Moodies ever put on record. “Out And In”, the churning “Gypsy”, and the wistful one-two punch of “Eternity Road” and “Candle Of Life” are a consecutive home run streak of winners. The album closes out with another winner, the gentle but eminently hummable “Watching And Waiting”.
Overall, To Our Children’s Children’s Children is one of the Moody Blues’ best efforts, and one of the best reflections of a lyrical style that is uniquely theirs. Their words express concerns and worries about the human condition, present and future, without taking the banal (and, for future listeners lacking the context, commercially fatal) route of making things topical. Even knowing the events that were going on when these songs were written is entirely optional – it becomes a subtext, not a context vital to understanding the songs. Beautiful stuff – there simply isn’t enough music like this around.
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- Higher And Higher (4:11)
- Eyes Of A Child I (3:23)
- Floating (3:00)
- Eyes Of A Child II (1:22)
- I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Hundred (1:05)
- Beyond (2:58)
- Out And In (3:41)
- Gypsy (3:33)
- Eternity Road (4:18)
- Candle Of Life (4:18)
- Sun Is Still Shining (3:36)
- I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Million (0:33)
- Watching And Waiting (4:16)
Released by: Threshold / Polydor
Release date: 1970 / remastered & reissued 1997
Total running time: 40:20
For the re-invention album that it’s supposed to be, the Moody Blues’ A Question Of Balance really seems to be less about re-inventing the seminal ’60s band’s sound and more about changing how the band achieved that sound. With some of their more eloquent numbers approaching the point where they couldn’t be duplicated outside of the studio, the Moodies tried to return to a more guitar-based sound that they could achieve on stage (keep in mind, this was over three decades ago, before they could get anyone’s symphony orchestra to back them up in front of Red Rocks or any other rocks). And yet there’s still a whiff of the epic here, largely thanks to early sampling/loop-based keyboards and synths like the Mellotron. Hence, not a huge change in the sound, but it was becoming easier to pull it off live.
A bit of a surprising discovery, this is actually the soundtrack of a National Geographic-sponsored IMAX documentary film, and it’s the product of the same team that re-arranged orchestral versions of George Harrison and Jeff Lynne tunes from Harrison’s Cloud Nine to serve as the musical backdrop of an Imax film about scaling Everest.
This is easily the best album the Moodies unleashed in the ’80s, and is the closest they’d been to their signature sound in many years. Still under the influence of keyboardist Patrick Moraz, the Moodies sported a very electronic sound, but their trademark harmonies and the songwriting of Justin Hayward and John Lodge keep the songs identifiably Moody (or is that Blue?). Most people remember the song “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere” from this album, though it’s packed with good music, my favorites being “No More Lies”, “Want To Be With You” and “Vintage Wine”. There are no bad songs on this album. If you 
Even the Moodies had to evolve with the times as synths and sequencers came into fashion, and this is the product of the evolution. Not unlike their contemporaries in ELO, the Moody Blues went just a little bit overboard in the electronics department with the help of new bandmate Patrick Moraz, but the band’s trademark songwriting salvages the endeavor by keeping the music in a recognizably Moody Blues vein. The singles “The Voice” and “Gemini Dream” came from this album, along with a couple of my 
favorite album tracks, “Talking Out Of Turn” and “22,000 Days”. 
Like Long Distance Voyager, this album is a rare case of the Moodies concentrating on style over substance, with keyboardist Patrick Moraz starting to contribute to the songwriting some. The best song is, by miles, “I Just Don’t Care”, a much more traditional Moody Blues love song that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in their ’60s repertoire, and of course everyone remembers “Your Wildest Dreams”, or at least the video from it.
What can I say for this album aside from the fact that it has one of the all-time weirdest opening sound-montages any rock act has ever assembled? Even though the piece to which the odd, UFO-like noises are attached is rather interesting, it’s quite a jarring departure from Future Passed. Still, there are many good things about the album, including the familiar Story In Your Eyes and one of my all-time favorite Moodies tunes, “Emily’s Song”. Despite these, however, this album has always managed to hit me in precisely the wrong way; I can’t put a finger on it. The album certainly falls within the 
parameters that the Moodies settled into after Future Passed, but somehow it doesn’t trip my trigger like most of their other material. 
I’ll probably be lynched for saying this, but here goes: Days Of Future Passed, not Sgt. Pepper, was the best rock album to come out in 1967. I can buy the arguments that Lennon and McCartney are/were masterful songwriters, and even that Sgt. Pepper was a huge technical leap for rock music. But the sheer beauty and depth of emotion with which the Moody Blues imbued their most famous – and so far unparallelled – album puts it light-years of the material the Beatles were turning out at the time. Days of Future Passed paints a humblingly poetic view of the progression of a single day, and the music keeps getting better as the “day” in question goes on. Naturally