“Willow” by Joan Armatrading

"Willow" was the song A&M chose to lead off Show Some Emotion, Joan Armatrading's fourth album, sending it out as a UK-only single on 7 October 1977. She wrote it in a hotel room in West Palm Beach, Florida, after deciding the bar she was booked to play was a horrible place and retreating to her room. Stuck in a place she didn't want to be, in more ways than one, she fixed on the willow tree outside her window as the one thing that stayed put, and wrote it a love song of sorts.

Glyn Johns produced and engineered it, and the band around her acoustic guitar is choice: Jerry Donahue on electric guitar, Bryan Garofalo on bass, David Kemper on drums and Georgie Fame on organ. It never troubled the UK singles chart, yet it became one of the songs people know her by.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.