Album: Modern Times (1975)

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• When we came to the station all the trains were rusty
  The doors were open and the windows broken in
  There was grass in all the cracks and the air hung musty
  The travel posters were flapping in the wind
  So we moved through the dust and gloom
  Playing waiting games in the waiting-room
  Lay our sleeping-bags out on the floor
  And on Sunday morning easy rider comes to me with apple cider
  Leaves me here without a place to go
  
  If I followed the coast road, I'd be home by evening
  The harbor lights still cut across the bay
  From the slot machine arcade the lights go streaming
  To the bikes outside the rock 'n' roll cafe
  Ah but you know those small town blues
  Are really too much to lose
  There's nothing really there to go back for
  And on Sunday morning easy rider comes to me with apple cider
  Leaves me here without a place to go
  
  Any railway station would be just fine, fine, fine
  To settle down and wash the cobwebs from your head
  Oh, if your situation's running dry, dry, dry
  Find a waiting-room beneath the stars to make your bed'
  
  Cause you know London can make your brain stall
  The streets get cold and empty on a rainy night
  So you duck into the subway station, you can hear the trains call
  They want to take you to the Earl's Court Road, but it don't seem right
  Cause it's na, na, na noowah
  On the juke-box, singing in the burger bar
  See the people's faces in the passing cars don't want to know
  And on Sunday morning easy rider comes to me with apple cider
  Leaves me here without a place to go
  
  You have the most appealing surface I have seen
  Bring it over here, lay it down by me
  Don't mean to make you nervous, I just mean
  To make you see, this is the place to be
  
  When we came to the station all the trains were rusty
  The air was empty and the platforms overgrown
  There were old tin cans and cats and the doors were crusted
  With mud and leaves and names carved long ago
  And the rails go on for ever in a silver trail to the setting sun
  You can follow them anywhere you want to go
  And on Sunday morning easy rider comes to me with apple cider
  Leaves me here without a need to know Writer/s: ALISTAIR IAN STEWART
  Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group
  Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Comments: 4

• Said Afazaz from MoroccoI quote
  
  ""Apple Cider Re-Constitution by Al Stewart: The Symbolism of Life Between Waiting and Moving.
  Leaving in this song is not simply about changing places. It is an inner journey in search of meaning. Temporary pleasures — such as imagined moments of love, or the noise and lights of the city — can make life less dull, but they do not offer real freedom or a final destination. Each moment of waiting on the "platform" reminds us that leaving is part of the human experience, and that the right direction must be chosen consciously.
  What deepens this symbolic reading is the origin of the song as Stewart himself described it: it is not the account of a real love story between two people, but the product of a free stream of consciousness that started from a vague, undefined childhood memory — an abandoned railway station near the village where he grew up. Stewart was born in Scotland, then moved with his widowed mother to southwest England, where there was a station near their home that was eventually closed and left to become overgrown and forgotten.
  So the only documented factual basis here is the place — that abandoned station. The narrator, the beloved, the journey to London, and the figure of the Easy Rider are all imaginative, poetic elements built later around the memory of the place — not the "imagining" of a specific love scene that Stewart had clearly in mind beforehand.
  Two layers therefore come together in the song:
  The limited factual layer: the station as a real childhood memory, a place left behind and later reconstructed poetically.
  The symbolic layer: the station as a metaphor for existential waiting, where the platform is that suspended space between leaving and staying, between a passing moment and a conscious direction not yet chosen.
  Leaving, then, is not complete simply through physical movement. It also requires coming to terms with the past (the abandoned place) and becoming aware of meaning (the direction chosen). This is what gives the song a depth beyond being merely an imagined love story in an abandoned station — at its core, it is a reassembly of memory fragments, not the telling of one specific event.""
• Loz Butler from England, Just Back From Southern UsaI used to be very pedantic about language too, but 'growed' out of it. If Al Stewart had used the word underground, it would have scanned poorly and might have been read literally (per underworld or even interrment). Later, he talks about London transport taking us "...to the Earl's Court Road...", which brings us lyrically above ground again, but requires our legs!
  He is a poetic lyrical artist and I congratulate him for the canvas of this song as well as the whole album, which I cherish on original vinyl.
• Libby from KentuckySame as ' Modern Times' - a combination of British and American english. Not one of my faves.
• Incognito from LondonIt is very odd that he uses the phrase "subway station" in this otherwise fantastic song. I would have said that it was an appeal to an American audience, but this is such a location-specific song, it just doesn't add up.

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