Swingtown

Album: Book Of Dreams (1977)
Charted: 53 17
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Songfacts®:

  • Swingtown is a fictional place where there's lots of music and dancing. The lyric is simple, with Miller suggesting a well-earned trip to Swingtown, where the "night is fallin' and the music's callin'."

    By this time, Miller had moved away from his roots as a blues artist with a dive into pop music. The hits came easily for him in these years, starting with "The Joker" in 1973. "Swingtown" was the third hit from his Book Of Dreams album, following "Jet Airliner" and "Jungle Love."
  • Miller wrote this song with Chris McCarty, a songwriter, musician and actor who co-wrote "Serenade" for Miller's previous album, Fly Like An Eagle. You can see him in the 1987 Sylvester Stallone movie Over The Top.
  • The album version runs 3:54 with an intro that goes 1:12 before the vocals come in. The radio edit goes 3:27, with about 20 seconds cuts from the intro.
  • This was Miller's last hit for a while. He took some time off after touring for the Book Of Dreams album and bought a farm, where he set up a studio he used to make his next album, Circle Of Love, released in 1981.
  • The single version is the first track on Miller's compilation Greatest Hits 1974–78. It's one of the most successful greatest hits albums in history, selling over 15 million copies in America. That's more than all his studio albums combined.

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