“Question” by The Moody Blues

Justin Hayward wrote and sang "Question", which went out as a Moody Blues single in 1970 and then opened their album A Question of Balance on Threshold. It climbed to number two in Britain and 21 in America, and it's really two unfinished songs bolted together, which is why it lurches from a furious, hard-strummed acoustic charge into a slow, aching ballad and back again.

Hayward wrote it while the band were touring the States, with young men their age dreading the Vietnam draft, and he felt they were speaking for that crowd. He came up with it overnight before a Saturday session, heard the bass line and drum part in his head, and had Graeme Edge drive it on the hi-hat. Tony Clarke produced, and they cut it in a few takes with hardly any double tracking, in keeping with the album's back-to-basics plan. Several critics have since ranked it among the band's very best.

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