Road Song: What am I Living For

This post is part of a heretofore unrecognized series, which until now has only included one other post. Back in the old days, a couple of my colleagues and I filled several 90-minute tapes with roads songs, which were for playing while on the road to, from, or in the field. Remarkably, those tapes survived, and I now have a copy of them on CD. The rules for qualifying a song as a road song were simple: any mention of streets, roads, highways, cars, trucks or truckers, or railroads and railroad tracks made the song a suitable one for our collection. The songs were basically travel songs, but airplanes and boats were out, if I remember right.

The Mark-Almond Band's What am I Living For is only vaguely a road song; it's mostly a love song that briefly mentions hitting the road. I've posted the song - along with the ones below - more in response to a long-ago post by Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds than as a continuation of my fairly unpopulated road song series. Stephanie said, "The Best Love Songs ...are the ones that look beyond the first blush." Her songs reminded me of What am I Living For, and that song then reminded me of the next two songs, which aren't road songs by any stretch of the imagination.

Only one website (that I could find) lists full lyrics for the Mark-Almond Band song; the lyrics are correct, some of what he's written about the Allman Brothers (totally unrelated to the Mark-Almond Band, and totally unrelated to the singer Marc Almond) is inaccurate.

Mark-Almond Band: What am I Living For
Album: Rising, 1972

Jim Croce: Time in a Bottle (a video here)
Album: You Don't Mess Around with Jim, 1972

James Taylor: Fire and Rain (lyrics and story here)
Album: Sweet Baby James, 1970



P.S. I saw James Taylor in concert in 1971 in Virginia.