Songoftheday 11/11/14 - Once upon a time once when you were mine, I remember skies reflected in your eyes...

The Moody Blues - "Your Wildest Dreams"
from the album The Other Side Of Life (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12

Today's Song of the Day comes from the veteran British progressive rock band the Moody Blues, who had a resurgence of popularity in the 80s, scoring a few top-40 pop hits in America including "Sitting At The Wheel" in 1983. Three years later the group released The Other Side Of Life, their twelfth studio album. Straying far beyond their orchestral roots into an mostly keyboard sound, nonetheless they adapted just the same as contemporaries like (Jefferson) Starship and The Kinks. The first single from the project, "Your Wildest Dreams", was written by lead singer Justin Hayward and produced by Tony Visconti, and sounded like something pulled off of an Electric Light Orchestra album. With the combo of newer sounds and a nostalgic lyric, they straddled the fence to appeal to a more mainstream 80s audience, and it worked...

"Your Wildest Dreams" became the Moody blues' third and so-far most recent top-10 pop hit in America in July of 1986. The track also climbed to #1 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary (their first hit on this chart) and #2 on the Mainstream Rock radio charts. Internationally, while the single went to #20 in Australia and was a minor hit in Canada, it failed to even make the British charts altogether.

Most strikingly, the video was huge on MTV, helping the album reach the top-10 in the U.S. And out of the glut of resurrected bands from the 60's, this one was one of the more mildly pleasant ones.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's the band live on a TV appearance (well, at least Justin's singing live)...

...and lastly, here they are live at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2000...

Up tomorrow: a trio of English mods have a romantic promenade.