A trumpet smiling at a lonely line
An acoustic guitar opens the door with a Spanish figure, bright and a little formal, and then the trumpets arrive as if a parade had taken a wrong turn into a love song.
Bryan MacLean wrote Alone Again Or for Love, finishing it in the summer of 1967 as the band recorded Forever Changes at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. Bruce Botnick and Arthur Lee produced. David Angel arranged the strings and the horns. MacLean had pointed him toward Rimsky-Korsakov and toward a baroque line under the trumpet, and Angel wrote the actual notes. The vocal is shared. Lee, who led the band and wrote most of the album, takes the song with MacLean, and the blend makes the loneliness sound almost social. The lyric says he will be alone again tonight, and the arrangement refuses to agree. It keeps smiling. The album came out in November 1967. The single, edited, barely charted. The opening track did not need the chart.
MacLean later said the words were not meant to stop the world. Friends teased him for the line about people being the greatest fun. He also said the orchestral arrangement of this song was the happiest he ever was with anything the band did. You can hear the happiness and the contradiction in the same bar. The acoustic guitar that begins the record returns at the end, smaller, and the smile of the trumpets has somewhere to go home to. Lee’s voice, drier than MacLean’s, keeps the song from floating off into costume drama. Sunset Sound in that season was also cutting harder, stranger records. This one chose elegance, and a little dread underneath.
That was the happiest I ever was with anything we ever did as a band, the orchestral arrangement of that song.
(Bryan MacLean)
The record sold modestly and then refused to go away. Later generations found Forever Changes as a complete thought, not a single with a tail, and Alone Again Or is the door. Covers, by the Damned among others, tend to push the rhythm and lose the courtesy. The original is polite in a way that feels dangerous, Los Angeles in late 1967, a band already coming apart, dressing a private fear in strings. Botnick’s production leaves the orchestra clear. Nothing is buried to sound modern. The song trusts the arrangement MacLean was proud of.
What remains is the title’s small word, or. Alone again, or what. The sentence does not finish, and the music does, beautifully, which is the tension. A man waiting for someone, a trumpet section that seems to have better plans, a guitar that knows the evening will end as it began. Love did not stay together long enough to become the band this album promised. The track does not apologise. It opens the door, lets the parade in, and then admits, in a voice that will not raise itself, that tonight will be the same as the others.
