Supertramp – Take The Long Way Home

A last-minute song, and the harmonica won

The album was already being built when this one showed up. Peter Henderson has said that by the time the Burbank eight-track demos were finished, Take the Long Way Home was not among them. Hodgson wrote it in Topanga, in the stretch when a song of his usually arrived in pieces over two or three weeks. He called it a last-minute surprise. The lyric looks, at first, like a man delaying the driveway. So you think you’re a Romeo, playing a part in a picture show. At home he is part of the furniture. On the road he still gets a few minutes alone with the version of himself that feels like a star.

Hodgson has always insisted on a second meaning under that joke. Not wanting to go home is the surface. Under it he was asking where home actually is, the same question that runs through The Logical Song, asked this time from the driver’s seat. The band cut the song at the Village Recorder in 1978, Studio B, co-produced with Peter Henderson, for Breakfast in America, released on A&M in March 1979. Hodgson sings. He plays keyboards and guitar. Thomson and Siebenberg hold the tempo so it does not rush.

The intro is the part you hear first. Hodgson remembers trying instruments and rejecting the obvious one. Saxophone, he thought, would have been too ordinary, which is a funny line in a band that has John Helliwell. They gave the hook to Rick Davies’s harmonica. Helliwell answers later on clarinet. That exchange, a bouncy keyboard line beside it, is what the song is known for once the lyric has done its work. The thought is of driving past your own exit. The tempo lets you tap a foot while you do it.