One of those beautiful, mellow pop songs that makes you think of long summer nights and lazy smiles with the people you love. Whenever someone complains about the prefabricated nature of the Monkees, I always want to play them this song and say “If this is what comes out of the whole deal, then you can build a million boy bands.” Not that all of them have Carole King songs to sing and such wonderful production to back them up, of course…
366 Songs 058: As We Go Along
There’s a gentleness and ease to “As We Go Along” that always appeals to me; the opening, mixing acoustic and electric guitars, sounds like a summer morning for reasons that I can’t really explain, and even when Mickey Dolenz’ vocal begins and the bass starts appearing in the bottom, everything remains lovely placid; it’s a song that feels sleepy not in a narcotic hazey kind of way, but a slowly awakening at your own speed way – Even when the song builds with the “Open your eyes/Get up off your chair” lines, it does so slowly and in such a way that you feel pulled along with it, gently and encouragingly (I thank the flute for that). This is a loving song, entirely and completely, a song that wants the best for you in a way that only really makes sense in the era before the mellow singer-songwriter era of the 1970s, before music fragmented to the point where that genre seemed to steal this kind of song away from the pop bands entirely.