Eight songs, thirty-nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of music, wrapped in a painting by Phil Travers. That is all that remains of the moment The Moody Blues reached the top of the American charts, and of the moment the five men in the band realised they could not keep going together. The album came out on October 23, 1972, and within weeks it had changed everything for them.
A first American number one
The group released Seventh Sojourn, their eighth studio album, on their own Threshold Records label. Within weeks it became their first number one in the United States, staying there for five weeks. In Britain it climbed to fifth place, but the real shock was America: after years of building a following, the band had finally conquered the biggest market in the world.
Yet the songs behind that success were written by men who were falling apart in different ways. Justin Hayward wrote 'New Horizons' after losing his father and watching other deaths around him. Ray Thomas wrote 'For My Lady' soon after a divorce. John Lodge, the bassist, wrote 'I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)' as an answer to fans who treated the group like gurus with secret wisdom.
Lodge had good reason to push back. Returning from an American tour, he found fans waiting outside his house, convinced he would lead them to a saving spaceship. The band's own success had become a trap, as drummer Graeme Edge put it: they were prisoners of what they had built. The album's title pointed the same way, with Lodge linking it to the biblical seventh day of rest and the word 'sojourn', meaning a stop.
The band's own success had become a trap, as drummer Graeme Edge put it: they were prisoners of what they had built.
A Chamberlin and a tense studio
The music itself had a new texture. Mike Pinder used a Chamberlin keyboard alongside his usual Mellotron, an instrument that worked on the same principle but offered richer sounds: brass, strings, cello. The new machine was louder and needed less studio trickery to sound good. But the sessions, which Hayward remembered as tense and unhappy, convinced him the five members would never make another album together.
The irony is that the album's biggest hit was not even new. 'Isn't Life Strange', a single released earlier that year, reached thirteenth place in Britain and twenty-ninth in America. But both of the album's new singles were overshadowed by a reissue of 'Nights in White Satin' from 1967, which climbed to ninth in the UK and second in the US, the group's highest American chart achievement among singles.
Lodge said the album was loosely based on the idea of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a journey with many voices and stops along the way. The journey, it turned out, had a hard ending. A year after the album, the band tried and failed to record a follow-up. Their next studio album, Octave, did not appear until 1978, six years after Seventh Sojourn had made them bigger than ever and, at the same time, made them unable to continue. The album also reached number one in Canada and number two in Australia, proof that the band's appeal stretched far beyond Britain and America. In 1973 they set out on a successful but exhausting world tour, travelling in their own Boeing 707 fitted with a lounge, a fireplace, two bedrooms, many televisions and a butler.
So the record sits in history as both a triumph and a farewell: their first American number one, and the last album the classic five-piece line-up made before the long silence. Eight songs. Thirty-nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Enough time to reach the top, and enough to know it was over. In 2007 the album was reissued as an SACD with four bonus tracks, including an unfinished 1973 recording called 'Island' from the sessions for the album that never appeared. A standard CD reissue with the same bonus tracks followed in 2008.