My Top 1000 Songs #698: Pinball

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

After yesterday's musical theme of nostalgia, here's one that conjures up strangely evocative feelings of the early 70s. British singer-songwriter Brian Protheroe's "Pinball," the title track of his 1974 album, is gently wistful, a folk-ish tune infused with jazzy yacht rock (in a good way), and for me captures a very specific moment in time. Now, I doubt I ever heard the song back when I was 8 years old--it charted in the UK, but I don't think he was a known quantity in the US--and only discovered his work a few years ago, so it shouldn't carry any personal associations for me. But it's one of those strangely familiar tunes that has this indefinable comforting embrace, that "where did I hear this before?" sense of deja vu even on first listen.

Also, it's wicked pretty.

Live on Top Of The Pops: