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.
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