Strange shapes light up the night
I’ve never seen ’em though I hope I might
Don’t ask if they are real
The men in black, their lips are sealed

Fantasy fills my mind
To leave this place before my time
Release myself from earthly care
My dream may be your nightmare…

Yes, I do have some Blue Öyster Cult…”

A pseudo-Fast Times reference, gang. This is the type of year we’re having.

Speaking of the year we’re heaving, 2025 is such an post-industrial consciousness-devouring nightmare of near Herculean proportions, it hardly abides the telling. Which makes Blue Öyster Cult smokin’ 1983 track Take Me Away an absolute critical inclusion in our annual Halloween playlist.

Co-written by Eric Bloom and Aldo Nova, Take Me Away was the album opener off of The Revölution by Night, BOC’s criminally underrated 1983 record. And man what an opener. It starts off with crunchy guitars, strong hooks, omnipresent playful menace. But you know… with hooks!

Take Me Away is ostensibly your alien abduction story. Even Men in Black are called out by name, but you still got your “strange shapes in the sky”, thousands of stars staring at you, minds filled with fantasy and wanting to pierce the veil, desiring to know more. To abandon this world.

You could make the argument the song flirts with themes of suicide ideation. I know I would.

But no matter how you slice Take Me Away, the song owns with its strong mix of hard rock, catchy hooks, anthemic AOR riffs, and just enough early 80s spookiness straddling the analog/digital divide.

We all want to know what’s out there. So draw back the curtain and step past the threshold as the experience relieves you of this world.

I turn my hopes up to the sky
I’d like to know before I die
Memories will slowly fade
I lift my eyes and say
Come on take me away…