Day 201: Gerry Rafferty – City to City

I have a neighbour who enjoys blasting music at inappropriate levels, which I don’t mind one bit since they have very good taste. I see them putting on specific songs as the first signs of spring. They put on their warmer weather music and I feel like it’s a sign of things to come, like seeing the first daffodils of the year or spotting your first bee of the season. Today is spring equinox and I hear a very specific saxophone line coming from my neighbours, so it’s time to get into the spirit of things with a bit of Gerry Rafferty.

Album cover courtesy of United Artists Records

Gerry Rafferty was a Scottish singer-songwriter from Paisley who first became known as a member of Stealers Wheel, a band that’s probably best known for "Stuck in the Middle with You", which was co-written and sang by Gerry Rafferty. His first solo album was released 1978, three years after Stealers Wheel disbanded, as he wasn’t allowed to release any music before that. It became an immediate hit, largely because of the single that later became a soft rock classic with an iconic sax part, "Baker Street".

I didn’t actually know Gerry Rafferty was Scottish until I moved here and started hearing him everywhere, but once you know it, it sounds obvious. He was raised listening to Scottish and Irish trad music and it clearly inspires his sound and his songwriting, but mainly it is pretty traditional folk rock with a hint of Americana.

If you’ve only heard the hits like "Baker Street" and “Right Down the Line”, you might expect something that’s more veering into the soft rock part of his repertoire, but mostly the album consists of softer, slower folk songs. Occasionally I also get a whiff of the Beatles, especially on “Stealing Time”.

It’s mostly a very mellow, beautiful album that makes for lovely listening. It’s not a lifechanging album for me, but it’s a very good jump into me embracing more folk music in my life, as I’ve said I want to do. I love the song “Right Down the Line” and will definitely keep that in the rotation, but I also can see myself listening to the full album in the future. Maybe I’ll be like my neighbour and use this as my spring must-listen. City to City is a cool and comfortable 8/10.

Also, fun fact, before Gerry Rafferty was in Stealers Wheel, he used to be in a duo called Humblebums, but they stopped when it became clear that his partner’s interests were elsewhere. That partner was Scottish comedy legend Billy Connelly:

When Billy and I went our own separate ways it was quite amicable at the time because it was obvious that Billy’s jokes were getting longer and longer and the songs were getting shorter and shorter. It seemed the wise thing to do was split. The monologues were about twenty minutes long and we had my two-minute songs sandwiched between the jokes. So Billy was developing more and more as a comedian and I was developing more and more with my music, so I went off and formed Stealers Wheel.