Favorite Songs of 1978

Quite frankly, the years from 1976 through 1979 were not very kind to me musically. One of the main reasons for this may have been the preponderance of disco music on the airwaves. I like some dance music, to be sure, but they went way overboard with this fad! Still, each year I did manage to filter out a few very good songs. In 1978, though, there just wasn’t very much to report. Boney M.’s Rivers of Babylon was a song that I chiefly heard on my short-wave radio. It’s an example of a tune that could have become a much greater hit in America had disco not so dominated the music industry here then. Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London and Jimmy Buffet’s Cheeseburger in Paradise were very funny (with a very dark twist for Zevon’s song). Pablo Cruz’s Find Your Place in the Sun was an upbeat, encouraging song that helped me get through this personally difficult year. At this time, I rode my bicycle everywhere. So naturally, Queen’s defiant Bicycle Race became a sort of anthem for me. Al Stewart continued making quality music with his very thoughtful Time Passages. Electric Light Orchestra released their greatest album ever, Out of the Blue, in 1978. It kicked off with Turn to Stone, a fast, sad, trademark old-style ELO song: non-disco with plenty of harmony and strings. My #3 song from 1978 was Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street. Rafferty, who was nominated for a Grammy that year, inexplicably couldn’t follow up on his great success in the following years. Whenever I hear that song, I think of Baker Street in my old hometown of Hollywood, Florida (there it’s a minor residential road I’d pass by on my way to school). Billy Joel came out in ‘78 with a couple of good songs: the “independent” My Life and my #2 favorite song of the year, his epic Scenes From an Italian Restaurant. But my top favorite song of that musically-depleted (for me) year was a very quirky, brooding and beautiful record by The Sweet: Love is Like Oxygen (full-length version).