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The 5th Dimension - Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

The 5th Dimension - Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: The Age Of Aquarius
Released: 1969

Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In Lyrics

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius
Aquarius

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in

Oh, let it shine, c'mon
Now everybody just sing along
Let the sun shine in
Open up your heart and let it shine on in
When you are lonely, let it shine on
Got to open up your heart and let it shine on in
And when you feel like you've been mistreated
And your friends turn away
Just open your heart, and shine it on in

Writer/s: MAC DERMOT, GALT/RADO, JAMES/RAGNI, GEROME /
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

This was written for the rock opera Hair, where it became an anthem for young people who grew their hair out and protested the US government. In the book By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution of 1969 , Bruce Pollock writes:
Among the many people calling the publisher in 1968 for a lock of Hair's mystique was the L.A. producer Bones Howe, who'd been working with the 5th Dimension since engineering "Up-Up and Away" for their first album in 1967. He'd produced hits for the Turtles ("It Ain't Me Babe") and the Association ("Windy"); he'd been a personal guest of Lou Adler at the Monterey Pop Festival where he was perhaps the only West Coast guy in attendance to appreciate Laura Nyro's gruesome performance. Later he delivered Laura's "Stoned Soul Picnic" to the 5th Dimension, for which it was their biggest r&b hit. He was shuttling back and forth between his home in L.A. and the studio in New York working on the vocals for the Stoned Soul Picnic album when the group told him they wanted to do "Aquarius."

"The thing that bothered me about it was that there'd been other releases of 'Aquarius,'" said Bones, "and none had done anything, so I was concerned about what we would do that would be any different. I went to see the show and there's a place where they do "The Flesh Failures" and at the end of the song is just a three bar repeated thing of 'Let the sunshine in' where Ragni was swinging across the stage on a chandelier and there was all kinds of craziness going on. That really stayed with me and I came out of the theater saying, I wonder if I could stick that on the end of 'Aquarius' and make that the ending. So I went back to the hotel and I called the publisher. I mean you don't mess with the music from a Broadway show. I started my professional career in 1956 and I knew a lot about what you can and what you can't do with songs. I said, look the 5th Dimension would like to record 'Aquarius,' but I'd like to make it a medley and I'd like to use the last three bars of 'The Flesh Failures' and I don't want to do it without permission. So he said okay, you can go ahead and do it."

The next problem was to go ahead and do it. "The record was plotted in the fall of '68 and more or less finished in January of '69," Bones said. "I had to do a lot of work with my vocal arranger, Bob Alsivar. Because they couldn't sing both songs in the same key, we had to do a modulation; we figured out how I was going to do the instrumental arrangement so we could change keys. The record itself is the result of a conglomeration of things. I began as a jazz musician and I know the standard repertoire pretty well. I kept thinking about a song called 'Lost in the Stars' and trying to find something to give you that kind of impression. I described it to Bill Holman and he wrote that beautiful woodwinds and strings part that's in the intro. We did the track in L.A. and the vocals in Las Vegas where the 5th Dimension were opening for Frank Sinatra. We were working in that studio in Las Vegas where you used to have to stop when the train went by. Once when we were doing practice runs while the train passed Billy started that riff at the end 'oh let the sunshine…' so I said, wait, let me put that on a separate track at the end. There were a lot of happy accidents making the record."

That the Age of Aquarius (harmony, understanding, sympathy, trust, mystic crystals, revelations) announced to mainstream America by the song had already irrevocably given way to Richard Nixon's vision of law and order troubled Bones Howe not in the least. "I was in my thirties then; I was never part of that culture," he said. "But I made records they liked. I spent my life in the studio. Sometimes I went to the Trip and the Crescendo and all of those places on Sunset Strip because I worked with so many of those people. I was the engineer on 'Eve of Destruction' when the Mamas and Papas came to sing backup vocals. I was there the first night they were there and did their first three albums."

The 5th Dimension was a highly popular ensemble group during the late '60s and early '70s. It originally consisted of Billy Davis, Jr., Marilyn McCoo, Lamonte McLemore, and Ron Townson, who were quickly joined by Florence LaRue. They at first called themselves the Versatiles, and owed their rise to Motown Records and Johnny Rivers, who had just started his own record company. This song turned out to be their biggest hit, staying at #1 for six weeks. The 5th Dimension performed several more hits over the years until 1975, when Davis and McCoo got married and left the group. The original group reunited in 1990 for a tour, capitalizing on the growing nostalgia for the music of its era. (thanks, Mike - Santa Barbara, CA)

The Age of Aquarius is when the sun is in the constellation Aquarius during the springtime. The next time that this will happen is 2448. We are currently in the age of Pisces. (thanks, Derick - West Hartford, CT)

This song won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1970. It was the second time the group won the Record of the Year, two years previously they won the award for "Up-Up and Away."

This appeared in the movie Forrest Gump, and has a big part in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin, where at the end of the movie the cast performs the song in Hippie costumes to celebrate the de-flowering of the virgin. (thanks, Dawson - Draper, UT)

In he movie Apollo 13, there are some scenes where the astronauts are filming live feeds from space from inside the spaceship for viewing on television (the live feeds were commonly featured on network TV in the early days of space flight). In the movie, the astronauts play Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" as the background music and theme song for the TV appearances. Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has since stated that the real song used as the "Theme Song" was "Aquarius," as Aquarius was the name of the Lunar Landing Module that ultimately served as the crew's lifeboat when the mission went awry. (thanks, justin - Canton, IL)

Ex-Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty used the "Let the sunshine in" refrain as the chorus for "Fort Hood," a song from his 2008 album Golden Delicious. (thanks, Joshua - La Crosse, WI)

The 5th Dimension - Go Where You Wanna Go

The 5th Dimension - Go Where You Wanna Go Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Up-Up and Away
Released: 1966

Go Where You Wanna Go Lyrics

[Chorus:]
You gotta go where you want to go
Do what you want to do
With whoever you want to do it with

[Chorus]

You don't understand
That a girl like me can love just one man
Three thousand miles, that's how far you'll go
And you said to me "please don't follow"

'Cause you gotta go where you want to go
Do what you want to do
With whoever you want to do it with

[Chorus]

You don't understand
That a girl like me can love just one man
You've been gone a week, and I tried so hard
Not to be the cryin' kind
Not to be the girl you left behind

[Chorus x3]

Writer/s: PHILLIPS, JOHN EDMUND ANDREW
Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Go Where You Wanna Go Song Chart

This upbeat song was written by John Phillips and issued as the first single for his group The Mamas & the Papas, appearing on their 1965 debut album If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. Their version went nowhere, but the group's next single, "California Dreamin'" was a huge hit.

"Go Where You Wanna Go" found new life when it was recorded by another group with both male and female vocalists, The 5th Dimension. The group was signed to Johnny Rivers' Soul City Records, where they released an earlier single called "I'll Be Loving You Forever" as the Versatiles. Rivers suggested the group cover the song, which was a good call: The song rose up the Hot 100 to #16 and set the stage for their breakthrough in 1967.

After the single proved a success, the group put a whole album together which included another traveling tune: "Up-Up and Away," which was written by a young songwriter named Jimmy Webb . The group ended up recording several Webb compositions, as his career took off along with the group's.

John Phillips wrote this song about Michelle Phillips' affair with Russ Titelman, a songwriter and record producer who did production work for Randy Newman, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Chaka Khan.

John and Michelle got married in 1962, but the following year their marriage was on the rocks. Michelle took up with Titelman and moved with him from Los Angeles to New York. This prompted John to write the song, with the very specific lines:

Three thousand miles, that's how far you'll go
And you said to me "Please don't follow"

Michelle and Russ split up not long after, but it was clear that Michelle viewed their marriage as more flexible than John did.

P.F. Sloan, who was most famous for writing the song "Eve Of Destruction," played guitar on the Mamas & the Papas original version. Sloan was friends with John Phillips, who played on P.F.'s solo track "City Women." In our interview with Sloan , he described "Go Where You Wanna Go" as "An absolutely stupendous record," adding, "It's magical. I thought it had everything. And it was a complete stiff. It just goes to show you that everything is timing. You'd think that if the song is great and the vocals are great and the band is great, you've got a hit, but God shows us that timing is everything."

Sloan also played on "California Dreamin'" and wrote what would be the second single for The 5th Dimension: "Another Day, Another Heartache," which made #45 in the US.

The jaunty melody belies the song's lyric, which is about a guy who leaves his girl behind, traveling to the other side of the country. The song is written from the girl's perspective - she is brokenhearted over his leaving, and almost sarcastically telling him to go wherever he wants and be with whoever he desires. She tries to impress on him that fidelity is an option: "A girl like me can love just one man."

This song featured in a 2011 commercial for Elderplan supplemental Medicare coverage. The spot showed various senior citizens singing along to this song, embracing the mantra of the title, if not the true meaning of the song.