Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is an album by The Moody Blues released in 1971.
Track Listing:
1. Procession (4'40")
2. The Story in Your Eyes (2'56")
3. Our Guessing Game (3'34")
4. Emily's Song (3'42")
5. After You Came (4'36")
6. One More Time to Live (5'41")
7. Nice to Be Here (4'23")
8. You Can Never Go Home (4'14")
9. My Song (6'19")
The first track, Procession, is very surreal. It opens the album with a descending sound effect that I can't put into words. Then the band shouts, "Desolation!" amidst the sound of wind. A thunderstorm begins, and they follow up with "Creation!", suggesting a Graham Greene-esque theme of beginning from nothing that is repeated elsewhere in the album. It then segues into a tribal drum beat with chanting and more -tion words said by the band. Then there's some flute and harpsichord music, followed by some organs, synth, and heavy guitars.
Certainly, the Moody Blues often include spoken word and surreal synth in their albums, particularly at the beginning, but this one is like no other I've heard before. It's an amazing opening. The rest of the album continues in the mostly familiar, wonderful, and unique style of the Moody Blues, which means plenty of synth and strings, and extremely generous use of beautiful vocal harmonies.
I'd definitely recommend this album to anyone who has heard and enjoyed anything by this band.
As an interesting side note, in the digital remaster that I have (remastered in 1997), the cover sleeve booklet thing features an interview with the band. Both John Lodge and the mysterious interviewer John Reed (in italics) claim that the album is titled after the mnemonic device for the tuning of a guitar, EGBDF. The funny thing is that guitars actually have six strings, and the tuning is EBGDAE. The only mnemonic device for guitar tuning I've heard is Every Bad Girl Does Anal Eventually. EGBDF is really the lines on a treble clef music staff.