“I had to come up with all the words ending in ‘al’,” he says. Hodgson invested “a lot of work” in the lyrics. Its first-person narrative made specific reference to his years at boarding school as a ‘shy and sensitive’ boy, deeply affected by his parents’ divorce when he was 12: ‘ They sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical/And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical…’ But as Hodgson says, The Logical Song was “very autobiographical”. It was a subject he had tackled before in School, a song from Supertramp’s 1974 breakthrough Crime Of The Century, a landmark progressive rock album. In The Logical Song, Hodgson delivered a damning critique of the education system. And many of us spend our lives trying to get back to that innocence.” We go from the innocence and wonder of childhood to the confusion of adolescence, and that often ends up in disillusionment in adulthood. Throughout childhood we’re taught how to behave, yet we’re very rarely told anything about the deeper purpose of life. The song was born out of my questions about what really mattered in life. “Right away, I knew what I wanted to say. And in that moment, the whole concept for the song came into focus. Immediately, Hodgson reeled off words that rhymed: intellectual, radical… logical. And as I started singing the melody, the first word that came to me was ‘liberal’…” But then one day when I was playing the chords, I heard the melody. “I had these chords written,” he says, “and I hadn’t thought much of them, to tell the truth. The band were in Los Angeles, about to begin recording the Breakfast In America album, when Hodgson sat alone at a Wurlitzer electric piano and began playing around with a chord progression he’d toyed with, off and on, for a couple of months. It was in early 1978 that The Logical Song started coming together.
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