Al Stewart
Between The Wars

The mere two years that separate "Between The Wars" of 1995 from the previous album "Famous Last Words" mark the shortest interval between two Al Stewart releases since 1980, hinting at the rediscovered and flourishing creative vein of the Glasgow artist. After a grand style restart, he attempts to accelerate by taking on a new challenge: his first concept album of his career.

As can be easily inferred from the title, AS utilizes his talent as a historian of song, focusing his attention on one of the most crucial and tumultuous periods of the Short Century, the two decades between the World Wars—years of oppositions, frictions, and radical societal and cultural changes already explored in beautiful songs like "Warren Harding" and "The Last Days Of June 1934." Here, however, the challenge is far more extensive, as Al Stewart intends not only to relive those years through the events that marked them so profoundly but also to revive the typical sounds and atmospheres of the era; a difficult challenge tackled with passion and utmost commitment, achieving significant success from a songwriting perspective, while the musical outcome looks a bit grayer, hard to assess accurately. However, I can affirm that "Between The Wars" is not among our artist's most inspired albums in absolute terms.

Don't get me wrong, BTW is a high-quality product sporting many memorable songs, but at times it sounds slightly dated and seems to lack a bit of spontaneity, as if Al Stewart's approach was more a pedantic reproduction rather than a personal reinterpretation. Despite this, the album is full of charm and history; particularly vivid, effective, and successful are two songs that incorporate slavo/balkan folk string traditions, the dramatic and sorrowful "Joe The Georgian", with the cry of vengeance from the victims of Stalinist purges that theoretically arises from hell, "There's Kamenev, Zinovev, Bucharin and the rest, we're sharpening our pitchforks and we're heating up the ends, we've got a few surprises for the mate when he appears, I hope he likes the next few million years", and "Night Train To Munich", inspired by a famous 1940 film, perfectly evoking a spy thriller atmosphere of yesteryear, full of signals, coded messages, nocturnal and smoky moods and characters acting as pawns in a tragic game. From the old to the new world, Al Stewart revives happy and carefree America of Calvin Coolidge's presidency, celebrating his new great hero in "Lindy Comes To Town", unaware of the abyss it would soon plunge into, and the insidious and disastrous power plays of the Versailles Treaty presided over by T. Woodrow Wilson and "enlightened" companions, elegantly satirized in "A League Of Motions", where the powers of the time appear akin to quarrelsome children intent on dividing a chest of toys, while the delicate and touching "Marion The Chatelaine" follows the events of the glamour icon Marion Davies, the scandals of rich and bored Hollywood seen from a more intimate, human and sensitive perspective. Europe, America but also a touch of Asia, Indochina with its ancient traditions, its natural landscapes captured in the tranquil and ecstatic "Sampan" with its evocative sax, alongside the distant and foreign presence of the French colonizers. Finally, the course of events spills into a melancholic crooner ballad like "Laughing Into 1939", enriched by mournful violins, a beautiful and crystalline melody, touching the heartstrings in the purest Al Stewart style, focusing on the feeling of forced merriment, of unconscious and ill-concealed imminent tragedy preceding great storms; the album's last words are "Out on the balcony come the king and queen and the crowd go wild, he's a little bit nervous but that's just fine, and they're laughing, laughing into 1939", then just music, just the unease, the Central European gloom of "The Black Danube", a river that flows, history that relentlessly follows its course.

As I already mentioned, not the entire album maintains these qualitative standards: the most evident disappointment is without a doubt "Always The Cause", not that it is a bad song; on the contrary, the banjo and violin work is very evocative and imaginative, but the Spanish Civil War is a topic that deserved to be presented otherwise, with deeper reflections, and this song seems almost like a somewhat stereotypical folkloric postcard. "The Age Of Rhythm" with its elegant swing is appreciated for its cynical portrayal of New York high society with its neuroses and paranoias, but musically leaves a bit cold due to its vaguely haughty static nature, much like the ballad of craft "Three Mules", about the ambiguous and collusive policies with Hitler of the British government in the '30s. "Between The Wars," a not simple project, of highest literary value and decidedly bold and anti-commercial in its proud anachronism, also marks the concluding act of Al Stewart's '90s production: only two albums but much quality, products of an artist who fully found himself and from there on will still manage to improve, not before "toasting," in his way, to the fateful third millennium, but that is another story.