Today’s selection is the first song, on the first side of Daniel Grayling Fogelberg’s first album, Home Free.  Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1951, the youngest son of a high school band director (“The Leader of the Band”) and a classically trained pianist, Fogelberg found inspiration in numerous musical genres, including folk, pop, rock, classical, jazz and bluegrass.

Beyond the fact that he was raised in a musical household, anyone who has read a number of these ThisRightBrain posts to date will recognize a passel of familiar themes in looking at Fogelberg’s early years.  As an adolescent who was learning to play the piano, he taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar that his grandfather had given to him. A talented multi-instrumentalist, he would eventually play guitar, bass, piano and mandolin.

At the age of 14 he joined his first band (a Beatles cover group) and then began to write his own songs while playing with his second band at the age of 16.  After high school, he studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and it was there, while playing in area coffeehouses, that Fogelberg was discovered.

The man who discovered him was Irving Azoff (a recent University of Illinois grad), who had discovered REO Speedwagon (another Urbana-Champaign act) and would go on to represent numerous other headliners, including: Christina Aguilera, Jewel, Journey, the Eagles, Seal, Van Halen, Neil Diamond, New Kids on the Block and Steely Dan.

Azoff managed to find work for Fogelberg in Nashville, so he could hone his skills as a session musician, which was where he recorded and released his debut album in 1972, albeit to rather tepid initial response (it was ultimately certified Platinum on re-release).

However, Fogelberg was soon performing as an opening act for Van Morrison and upon the release of his second album, 1974’s “Souvenirs” (produced by Joe Walsh, another Azoff client), he struck lucky with “Part of the Plan”which would be the first in a long string of hits in a career that lasted nearly to his death from prostrate cancer in 2007.

This, Dan Fogelberg’s “debut track” is unique to his canon of some 15 studio albums, in that it features no guitar.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Saturday 19 May

To The Morning

Watching the sun

Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops.

Cloudy and warm

Maybe a storm

You can never quite tell

From the morning

And it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to

Say but

Come on morning

Waiting for mail

Maybe a tale

From an old friend

Or even a lover

Sometimes there’s none

But we have fun

Thinking of all who might

Have written

And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange

The sounds of the day

They hurry away

Now they are gone until tomorrow

When day will break

And you will wake

And you will rake your hands

Across your eyes

And realize

That it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to say but

Come on morning