Your Own Special Way

It was sometime in 1980 that I listened to Wind and Wuthering for the first time. I had discovered Genesis a couple of years earlier and already considered them one of my favorite bands.

As I'm listening to this album, it plays the song Your Own Special Way, and when it comes to the refrain, I hear it and think to myself, I've heard this musical passage before in another song but it didn't have the same continuation after the first musical phrase. For the life of me, though, I could not place where else I'd heard it. I figured it would come to me eventually or I would hear this other song, but neither ever happened. I began to wonder if I'd heard Your Own Special Way on the radio before and had misremembered the continuation, but that didn't feel right.

A few years ago I had an almost-wow moment when the passage from the song was running through my head, mutating, getting closer to something I recognized, and it finally came to me. It was part of the long instrumental passage at the end of Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. The musical passage fit and even had the right continuation to fit the unidentified song. But the tempo was wrong and I was pretty sure that song had vocals.

Then just a couple of days ago, another song came to me - it was Shannon by Henry Gross, a one-hit wonder from 1976 that I don't think I'd heard since it was a hit. I could only recall the refrain in my head, and noticed it was somewhat similar to Your Own Special Way but not a real good fit. Still it nagged at me, so last night I downloaded the song and this morning I listened to it. And that was my wow moment. The first verse of Shannon was the exact passage I'd been trying to match to the refrain of Your Own Special Way.

27 years after I first heard Your Own Special Way, the mystery is solved at last.

By the way, I don't consider Your Own Special Way to be a Genesis favorite. I like it but I like most of the other songs on Wind and Wuthering more. A couple of participants in an old Genesis fan group I used to be on named it as a least-favorite Genesis song.

I LOVE that song!

Lovely song ^^

I think Your Own Special Way sounds bad after One For The Vine. Therefore, I don't like it. The worst song from Wind & Wuthering (in my opinion).