“This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today…But you must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.”
—Herman Hesse/“Klingsor’s Last Summer”.

Right now it’s about 6:30 a.m. The day is fresh, the sky is pink, and it’s so quiet that I can hear a Downy Woodpecker poking holes in the eucalyptus tree. Other birds are singing and flying back and forth across the garden. A few crows call to each other. It’s peaceful. Serene. Meditative.

Leon Russell understood exactly what Hesse was talking about, especially sing a song, one of your best.

“Life is a song, and love is the music.” – Leon Russell

Leon’s last recording of his iconic A Song For You from the album A Distant Shore, was released posthumously in 2017.

Leon alwaysalways managed to convey a lifetime of authentic heartfelt emotion in every word and note, as he played the piano like no one ever will again. This version is beautiful; reflective, melancholy.

“A Song For You” by Leon Russell

I love you in a place
Where there’s no space and time
And when my life is over
Remember when we were together
We were alone, and
I was singing this song for you —

Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist, and winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. His interest in Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, combined with his involvement with Jungian analysis, helped shape his literary work.

Nearly fifty years earlier, this was Leon on the Homewood Sessionc with “A Song For You”…

In December 1970 Leon Russell recorded the Homewood Sessions at the Vine Street Theatre in Hollywood, broadcast as an ‘unscripted and unrehearsed’ one-hour TV special on KCET TV and later re-broadcast several times on the Public Broadcasting System. They actually shot six hours but only broadcast one. Claimed to be the first national broadcast of a stereo rock and roll performance, this would have required an FM simulcast, since American television was not stereo in 1970s.