Gene Hood's Acoustic prog-folk masterpiece Out of the Clouds from 1980

Here's a masterpiece I've treasured for a long long while, partly due to the fact it reminds me of so much alternative music from the mid-nineties, which as I've mentioned I grew up on, like Chris Cornell's acoustic compositions or any number of those brilliant inventive ssw artists of that period.  Yet this album came out in 1980 at the tail end of the whole US acoustic rock period, astonishingly.  Despite that year--which is hard to believe--there is not a single hint of any kind of eighties digitalese in here, no echoey chords, no synthesized repetitive drums, jumpy beat, slapped bass, dull and weak guitar sound.  Rather, it's shockingly ahead of its time in that it heralds so much of the earnestness, to my ears, of the later alternative scene at least 12 years away still.

Opening track Friends just gives me chills every single time:

In terms of the Chris Cornell similarity, listen once to his solo folk track from the Singles OST (I hope this youtube link lasts), the song called Seasons.  Obviously, Chris' song is much more professionally produced and arranged, we could never expect as much from Gene Hood's privately pressed work, never mind the extreme beauty of Chris's singing.  I went back to read wiki's page on him and felt so much sadness about how he died by suicide, about 4 years ago now, after suffering so much from lifelong depression. Like so many others we have read of here like Radka Toneff, he completed the act he sung about so often.  So much sadness and emotion is hidden in the beauty of art, isn't it. Then you think of someone like the comic Robin Williams, so brilliantly funny, so effective at hiding the massive depression that took him away eventually.

Anyways, the track called Time to Rise also to me 'recalls' (heralds?) that alternative emotional, earnest brilliance that was soon to come 15 years later: