My Top 1000 Songs #842: In The Square/The Letter

[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.]

I've vacillated on whether to count this gorgeous ditty off the Pretty Things' underappreciated 1970 stylistic smorgasbord Parachute as a proper stand-alone song. That record, pivoting from late 60s psychedelia on its first side to the harder-rocking direction the band would take in the 70s on the second, kicks off with a wonderful medley of interwoven tunes, arguably as commendable as the Beatles' better-known Abbey Road medleys. But I called an audible and split the medley up. I've already noted "The Good Mr. Square/She Was Tall, She Was High," which is pretty phenomenal. But that then segues into "In The Square" and "The Letter," and I tend to listen to the pair as a single track. (More negotiable is "Rain," the harder-rocking, more acid-drenched piece that closes out the medley.)

"Square" itself is gorgeous, with beautiful harmonies and gentle acoustic guitars, tranquil and transcendent, a psychedelic ballad that, for all its flower-power karma, still feels deeply affecting. "The Letter" is maybe too cute, but makes for a respectable counterpart, lightweight yet sweet, again highlighted by some fantastic harmonies. That bridges convincingly into the assertive bombast of "Rain," cueing up the pivot into a new decade. The whole thing also seems, at least to me, like a prescient preview of what the retro-psychedelic band Olivia Tremor Control would be doing a quarter-century later.

Here's "In The Square" (with "The Letter" and "Rain"):

Live 1971:

And live in 2004 (starting about 3 minutes into the clip):