The King Will Come

Wishbone Ash built this track around a concept of dual lead guitars that was still genuinely unusual in early seventies rock, and nowhere does that approach pay off more completely than here. The two guitars don't fight — they converse, trading melodic lines in a way that feels more orchestral than typical hard rock, one voice answering the other across a vast sonic space. The production has an unusual openness to it, a sense of air and distance that makes the song feel like it takes place outdoors, under a large sky. Andy Powell and Ted Turner together create something that owes debts to both British folk tradition and American blues, a synthesis that was distinctly their own. The tempo is measured, unhurried, building its tension through accumulation rather than aggression. Vocalist John Wetton — later of Asia — brings a clean, controlled delivery that suits the song's quasi-mythological ambitions; this is music reaching for something elevated, concerned with cycles of power and the arc of history. The lyrical imagination is drawn from the symbolism of Arthurian legend and early Christian mythology filtered through a progressive rock sensibility, the kind of grand narrative sweep that felt entirely natural in 1972 when rock music still believed it could carry that kind of weight. Late nights, headphones, a particular mood of reflective solitude — this is where the song finds its ideal listener, someone willing to follow its long melodic arcs to their unhurried conclusion.