Songfacts®:

• There are two ways to listen to this ballad: as a generic love song where life will be "forever autumn" now that you're gone - possibly dead; and as something very specific.
  
  Although Jeff Wayne wrote the melody as long ago as 1969 - as a jingle for a commercial - and it was recorded by co-writers Vigrass & Osborne for their 1972 album Queues. "I'd done a Lego ad that at the time was very popular," Wayne recalled to Mojo magazine. "People wrote in, asking if it was a record they could buy, which it wasn't until Vigrass and Osborne wrote lyrics and it became Forever Autumn."
  
  His uptempo version is distinctly inferior to the later Justin Haywood version, which was recorded for Wayne's musical version of The War Of The Worlds.
  
  To understand it properly, it is probably best to listen to the entire (double) album, on which it is the 2^nd track on Side B running to 7:43.
• The radio edit single runs 4:07 and was released on the CBS label backed by "The Fighting Machine." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2
• Moody Blues singer Justin Haywood's version of this tearjerker was released as a single, peaking at #5 in the UK and #47 in the US in 1978. "I had a call," Haywood recalled. "Asking if I was the guy who sang 'Nights in White Satin.' I guess Jeff Wayne wanted that same plaintive feel. He sent over a demo of Forever Autumn."
• In the song, migrating birds and falling leaves represent the disappearance of the singer's lover, and now his "life will be forever autumn." The lyrics perfectly suited a scene Wayne needed a song for. "There was a moment in the score from a story point of few, when the wife of the journalist is missing," he told Mojo, "and it was as if Forever Autumn had been written for it."