‘Man’s Road’
By: America
I’ll start with a confession:
I never saw ‘The Last Unicorn’ until I was in my twenties. Whew! There, I said it. That’s a load off my chest.
You might find that rather odd since I grew up with Rankin & Bass Christmas specials…and I was fairly obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien thanks to my mother, who would read ‘The Hobbit’ to me and my sisters when we were very little.
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For those of you unfamiliar with Rankin & Bass, they were the dudes responsible for bringing such beloved Christmas stories as ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Frosty the Snowman’ to life, using a classic, animated style or occasionally stop-motion animation with little puppets made out of felt & cardboard, etc.
| You put one foot in front of the other. |
The neat part about these holiday specials is that, for the most part, original music was written to supplement the show:
I remember being blown away when I discovered that Rudolph was produced in 1964…meaning that it was a part of my parents’ childhood as well as mine. Still, somehow as a child I’d managed to miss out on several of Rankin/Bass’ feature films, including The Wind in the Willows and, most importantly, The Last Unicorn.
I was familiar with the Band America long before giving in and enjoying what was, in my mind at the time, essentially a little girls’ movie. My mother used to add the album History to the old Sony 5-disc changer on shuffle, and thus America became a childhood staple along with Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat and other (now somewhat obscure) baby-boomer music.
Since America’s contributions to The Last Unicorn were not considered a part of their ‘greatest hits’, they were not included on the album History. Thus, similar to my brief love affair with Evanescence after watching Daredevil, I knew that I had to have the music after watching the movie.
Man’s Road fits the movie perfectly. America’s folky, clean-vocals style lends itself well to a song about the beginning of a difficult journey. For me, it became the theme song of one of my fantasy role-playing campaigns…and I’ll be honest, I’ll probably use it again for the exact same thing. Some bands, some songs are a little more timeless than others, and everybody can relate to what it’s like, walking man’s road.
…even if the lyrics aren’t exactly gender-neutral.
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