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“Dancing in the Moonlight (It’s Caught Me in Its Spotlight)” – Thin Lizzy
(Words/music: Phil Lynott, available on Bad Reputation, Mercury 1977)

I’m a night person, and over my lifetime this has been an annoyance to my mother, a badge of honor, a source of professional stress, a partial reason for giving up caffeine for a couple years, and currently an accepted fact of my existence.  Even though I love the early morning, my body prefers to meet the quiet hours right before falling asleep rather than waking up in time for them.  Regardless, I don’t try to fight it as much anymore.  Instead, I try to use my most lucid hours to my advantage (part of the reason why ninety percent of these posts go up just before midnight) and try not to stress too much about the nights where I’m in bed wide awake at 1:30 AM.

In a strange way, I’d say that the late hours feel just like the introduction to this song.  It creates a relaxed cool propelled by finger snaps (because snare drums would wake the neighbors).  Of course, my late nights rarely sound as cool as Phil Lynott, who soulfully tells a story of a teenager getting in trouble for a late night romantic tryst.  His narrator offers the defense that the moonlight made him do the E-Street shuffle, and understand what’s he’s trying to say.  If the late nights and early mornings are equally quiet, the associated revelations tend to be different.  Early mornings offer solitary moments of personal reflection while late nights provide the time to be alone with someone else.  Whether at a dance meeting the pretty people or dancing on the streets with one specific person, the night gives the opportunity to have moments impossible during the busy mid-day rush.   These are the kind of moments that make us spontaneously dance, even if we know we’ll be paying for the consequences for the next few days.

More on Thin Lizzy: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm