The Days Grew Longer For Love

Album: Love And Poetry (1969)
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Songfacts®:

  • Songfacts reached out to Andwella's Dream frontman Dave Lewis to ask what this song was about. He said, "The song was written about my first love and times shared together in Northern Ireland. It was also a song about moving on, and I think I wrote it when I first lived in London. I was probably about 17 at the time."
  • "The Days Grew Longer For Love" was a product of the 1960s psychedelic music boom, which dried up and blew away as fast it started. The phenomenon, which owns an outsized influence in pop-culture history, really only lasted for two years, from 1967 to 1969. Many acts arrived late to the party to find that the musical zeitgeist had already moved on by the time their music hit the record stores. Love and Poetry by Andwella's Dream is an example of just such a product, which is probably why the album was forgotten and buried by the sands of time until the internet dusted it off in the 2010s.

    The album was released by CBS Records, which was actually Columbia Records using a different name in order to differentiate themselves from the Columbia Graphophone Company. They were one of the major labels of the era, with Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel in their stable. So, Love and Poetry was not an indie or even small-label release. It was put out there by industry big dogs with the assumption that it could make money.

    As with many lost relics of that era, things simply didn't work out. Also like so many lot relics of that era, it has grown in stature over time. Today, many hardcore music-history nerds and psychedelic enthusiasts consider it one of the great works of the era and one of its most unfairly lost gems.

    "The Days Grew Longer for Love" wasn't chosen as the single to be released from Love and Poetry in 1969. A tune named "Sunday" earned that honor. Yet, in its retrospective fan following, it is the opening track of "The Days Grew Longer for Love" that has earned the most attention as the real standout of the album.
  • Andwella's Dream came out of Northern Ireland - Van Morrison country. In addition to Dave Lewis, they were Nigel Smith on bass and vocals and Gordon Barton on drums.

    They recorded Love and Poetry in 1968, presumably having no idea that the psychedelic music genre they were embracing would very soon smack face-first into the end of its lifespan. The genre never vanished completely, of course, but after '69 it faded in relevance, and by the early '70s already sounded dated. Luminaries such as The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd lived on, but the vast majority of the acts found themselves forgotten before they'd even been heard. The genre might have been victim of its own success, as it was so intrinsically linked to the hippie counterculture that it had no staying power after that counterculture lost favor. Then disco came along.

    The band went through a transformation and changed its name to Andwella (dropping the Dream). They made one more album, People's People, in '71. It too failed to make waves. They broke up for good in '72.

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