YOUR OWN SPECIAL WAY

"Your Own Special Way" is a song composed by Mike Rutherford. Curiously, in the interviews which were included as a documentary in the DVD of the most recent edition of the "Wind and Wuthering" album, both Rutherford and Phil Collins considered this album to be "the most feminine" (!!!???) in quality in their discography (whatever they considered as "feminine" in quality, a definition really hard to understand in musical terms by me anyway). Well. Maybe some musicians don`t consider their music in the same opinion as when they were twenty-something to when they are sixty-something in age! Tony Banks, in comparison, considers this album as their most "romantic" and one of his two favourite albums from the band (not really unexpected as he was the main composer of the songs in that album). By his part, Steve Hackett said that he is still very fond of this album, despite that it was the last album he recorded with the band. Anyway, many people blamed Collins for the "sugar ballads" that the band released in their albums after Peter Gabriel left the band in 1975. Well. I think that Collins wasn`t the only member in the band who really liked this kind of songs (as Rutherford and Banks sometimes have recorded the same kind of songs in their solo albums too), so in my opinion some of the criticism towards Collins is not fair. This song by Rutherford is a love song, a "sugar ballad" with acoustic 12 string guitars and very good arrangements that again some members of the band in hindisght didn`t like very much (I think that sometimes they are very critical of their own music without a real justification). Maybe this song, relased as a single, was their first attempt at a Hit Single, which it wasn`t. Anyway, I still like the "Wind and Wuthering" album very much despite the opinions expressed by Rutherford and Collins in that interviews, and I prefer the opinions which Banks and Hackett have about this album.

Update (27-June-2014): "Your Own Special Way" was released in an edited form for this single release, without the Fender Rhodes Electric Piano solo arrangement. So, the song sounds better in its original form, in my opinion.

The B- side, titled "It`s Yourself", is a song recorded during the "A Trick of the Tail" album sessions in late 1975 which wasn`t released in that album. It has some parts which were used in "Los Endos" from the same album. It is a song composed by the four members of the band, and it is very good like the album for it was originally recorded. In this single B-side, the full version of this song was released. It was later edited a few seconds at the end of the song for its release in the "Archives 1976-1992" Box Set in the year 2000.