Song of the Month!

Trains have rolled through my songwriting since 1981’s “Shortwave Radio,” and the two songs offered as a medley for my July 2024 “Song of the Month!” share that motif, as well as a strategic D chord. The medley has a fine build-up that nicely ends performances by the Americana duo Day for Night — that’s what you’re hearing here, as Gretchen Schaefer and I close our 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree set. (Thanks, Dennis!)

But I’d like to think that 2019’s “(Waiting For A) Westbound Train” and “Just A Moment In the Night,” from 2015, also have something deeper in common: a perspective on time’s passage that I couldn’t have expressed even a couple years earlier. How do you regard the flow of years once youth’s optimism and impatience have run out and nostalgia is exposed as just another opiate of the masses? — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Westbound Train–Just A Moment In The Night” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“(Waiting For A) Westbound Train” copyright © 2019 and “Just A Moment In The Night” copyright © 2015 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo credits: Above, Gretchen Schaefer (at far right) and the California Zephyr at Galesburg, Ill., July 4, 2017. Photo: Doug Hubley. Below, Gretchen and Doug are Day for Night, shown at the 2023 Mountain Man Jamboree. Photo: Don Perkins.)