Sango 1 (Song For/About My Friends) and 2 [by request]

These were posted by prognotfrog in the past, perhaps not the second one, only the first.  At any rate I didn't think it amiss to include the second with the beautiful cover drawing of the singer, who is Susanne Vogt, and as he says, she is a German Joni Mitchell:

From prognotfrog:

"Exploring more in the private-pressed German files we have here an interesting singer-songwriter-like album with a lady who sounds eerily like Joni Mitchell, Susanne Vogt. That is, Joni in her late seventies era of course along the lines of the Don Juan album. The beautiful Vogt (check out the back photo) is also credited with composition on a few songs and plays acoustic guitar on tracks 1 and 7. Cover and back are very charming drawings credited to Albert. (?)
Titles are arranged by Sango, lyrics by Wolfgang Natus except track 2 by Riemann and 9, lyrics by Wehnhardt and Vogt. Album produced by Rolf Dressler.

Other credits:
Rainer Worm - bass, vocals
Harald Wehnhardt - guitars
Rolf Dressler - piano
Werner Fromm - percussion
Werner Loose - rec. engineer

They produced another very hard to find record brilliantly called '2' in 1983 which is reputed to be more interesting and progressive (despite an oddly low review on rym)."

These albums are from that period in the late seventies, early eighties, when German music really reached an apogee.  In this regard I studied with great interest last week an article devoted to the study of the GPI -- a measure which is distinguished from the much overused GNP or GDP which ignores declines in standards of living caused by resource depletion, crime, and pollution, plus other negative effects on life (these are counted positively in GDP stats, which is completely counterintuitive).  GPI as you can see from Wikipedia counts those harmful effects negatively.  So what do we conclude after tracking it over the course of the last hundred years?  Unlike the ever-increasing GDPs, the GPIs peaked in the early seventies for most western countries and have since fallen slowly.  Finally here we have a metric that confirms what we all know and believe-- life has been getting worse for most of us starting 40 years ago!  What was interesting to read was that the GPI peak occurred later in Germany than in the UK, coincidentally with the progressive rock peak or rock music peak that I believe happened there and that was later than the UK.  Is it possible GPI and the efflorescence of prog rock are correlated?  Sure, and it's not hard to see why, when times are improving there is a lot of hope and excitement in society, esp. for the artists.  Think of how hard it would be for someone today to say they believe in their art and will make serious music successfully, compared to back then.   I look at all those crazy experimental albums they produced in the early seventies and that have shown up in the multitudes on mutant sounds and shake my head thinking, no way anyone today could make an album like that one... at any rate, it's something to think about.