Oh, I had a dream
It seemed I stood alone
And the veil of all the years
Goes sinking from my eyes like a stone

A king shall fall and put to death by the English parliament shall be
Fire and plague to London come in the year of six and twenties three
An emperor of France shall rise who will be born near Italy
His rule cost his empire dear, Napoloron his name shall be…

Like so many of you, I’m starting to get really creeped out every time a ghost starts lecturing me while I’m at the library.

I mean it. One minute you think you’re safe, flipping through some dusty old tome about European mystics and the best of the Yersinia pestis years. But then the candle’s burned too low and some erudite spook starts whispering about the end of days, in the form of a folksy 70s singer-songwriter.

That’s right; we’re talking Al Stewart and his epic masterpiece Nostradamus.

Released in 1973 on the Past, Present and Future album, this track closes the record with over nine minutes of spine-tingling prophecy. So if you’re expecting the gentle pleasant familiarity of “Year of the Cat” or “Time Passages,” go ahead and slap on a turtleneck or something and groove gracefully with those lush soft rock classics. No judgment, no shame in that game.

But before he was Yacht Rockin’ with those hits, Stewart dabbled in this sweeping folk-rock séance about a sixteenth-century French astrologer who spent most of his spare time jotting down the apocalypse in verse.

Nostradamus starts slow and easy enough: a haunting guitar figure, a shimmer of keyboard, and then a gently echoing voice that sounds like it’s giving us a tour of some medieval cellar. Off the bat Stewart seems downright eerie, channeling history, madness, and fate, all wrapped up in a calm, propulsive melody.

The rhythm builds, faint at first, until it sounds like the hoofbeats of some spectral army marching straight into… somewhere, I guess. Some area of awareness we can’t quite perceive. Like precognition, extra sensory perception, spiritual alignment, or perhaps just throwing every prediction against the wall and seeing what sticks and what slithers down the wallpaper like Jello in August.

All the while, Stewart’s voice never cracks or wails; it just knows. That quiet certainty makes it a zillion times more unsettling. Plague, war, kings, dictators, and fools, all spinning through time under the detached gaze of Nostradamus. The oracle sees it all but he’s powerless to stop any of it.

Humanity just keeps blowing itself up, century after century, and the prophet’s stuck watching the reruns.

So yeah, Nostradamus isn’t necessarily your typical Halloween tune. This one’s darker. Quieter. It clings to that hour of the night, the wolflight of flickering candles and fading laughter. Compelling you to remember that Halloween, for all its frivolities, is part and parcel a reflection on death, memory, and both the uneasy beauty and recursive horror of things that outlast us.

Al Stewart knew. Nostradamus knew. And hopefully, hopefully, we probably know too. But during the Spooky Season, it’s OK to listen and pretend we don’t.

From Castile does Franco come and the Government driven out shall be
An English king seeks divorce, and from his throne cast down is he
One named Hister shall become a captain of Greater Germanie
No law does this man observe and bloody his rise and fall shall be

Man, man, your time is sand
Your ways are leaves upon the sea
I am the eyes of Nostradamus
All your ways are known to me…