Listen to John Lodge’s New Song ‘In My Mind': Exclusive Premiere

Moody Blues singer and bassist John Lodge is about to release 10,000 Light Years Ago, his first solo album in 38 years. We’re pleased to present the premiere for “In My Mind,” which you can listen to above.

Lodge tells Ultimate Classic Rock that he’s been planning the album for nearly a decade and began writing songs for the project two and a half years ago. Once he had decided that he wanted to make a new album, he knew what the songs would be about.

“I had this saying that kicked around in my head for ages, of how the future is always in reach, but the past is gone forever. I know they’re only words, but I was trying to think, what does that actually mean? I suddenly realized that it is about who we are now and who I am now and there’s nothing you can do about the past,” Lodge explains. “The past has brought us to where we are today. The future is what’s important.”

Lodge says as he started writing the songs, "the influences have been may have been what’s happened to me in my past, but I wanted to do it as of today. I think the analogy I’ll use is that if you look at the sky in the night, what you see up there may not even exist. We’re only seeing what happened from the light emission millions of years ago, so who knows? So what’s important is what’s there today, [with] what you see and that’s how I approached the album.”

“In My Mind” was the first track that he wrote for the album. “I wanted the song to say that this whole album is in my mind. That was what it was about, really,” Lodge says. “This whole album was in my mind and it’s got to come out of there. ... It’s about what you can see in the world if you keep your eyes open for everything. It’s in your mind, but if you look outside of your mind, you can see everything else as well. That’s really what the song is about.”

The new album, which will be released on May 5, reunites Lodge with his former Moody Blues bandmates Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder. The reunion with Thomas is especially surprising, but as Lodge notes, the pair never fell out of contact.

“I met Ray when I was 14 and we put a band together called El Riot and the Rebels. We were together for about four years and actually during that time, Mike Pinder came and played keyboards for a while with us,” he says. “Ray lives not far from me in England -- he lives a mile away and we’re still best of friends. We share the same doctor, we send birthday cards to each other and everything else. I’d written this song called 'Simply Magic,' and I thought, It’s perfect for Ray. If this was a Moody Blues song, Ray would be playing flute on this.”

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