Old Enough to Forget

Right off I'll say the only reason I got this was so I could take a monstrous dump on their 1976 earworm "Afternoon Delight" a song so catchy and equally irritating that I felt it was by doody to avenge my nearly ruined childhood by being merciless to a band who never did anything to me other than craft a song that got under my skin. Heck despite McCartney writing "Silly Love Songs" I still listen to his stuff, so I'm not sure why I'm so excited to go after a soft rock act that never hurt anyone. So I put the album on and had my knives out waiting for the first song to start ... "Boulder to Birmingham" immediately got my attention, and I put down my knives. What the hell was this? This song was fantastic. Looking at the liner notes the song was written by Emmylou Harris and Bill Danoff.  The second track was a little more generic country pop but again, it was pretty solid. This was irritating, I so wanted this to be terrible. For a group who ca...

Michael Sembello is probably best known as the dude who performed "Maniac" and absolutely nailed the guitar solo. It's a near perfect pop song and a song I always really liked. A lot. I always wanted to get the song, but I didn't want to get the Flashdance soundtrack, because I didn't want to. It was too much like having to listen to the kids from Fame all over again, and I know Irene Cara was a fine vocalist and all that but I never really liked her stuff, and I'm sure the passage of time has softened the edges off my opinion, but I'm sticking to my guns. I do remember almost getting this album. The cover had two oiled up dudes levitating off the ground while the guy in the white diaper cupped the other little dude's junk. It was a weird cover and Michael Sembello with his half black, half white face looked like a reject from the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was sitting reading an old Godzilla comic. It was a little ...

I suppose there's a "Piano Man" pun somewhere to be had here - and I'm trying my best to type one but I'm using the wrong kind of keyboard. Yeah, sorry. Back in the summer of 1980 Glass Houses had firmly become part of my musical landscape. Oddly enough I didn't have my own copy at the time - everyone I knew had one, so I figured I was in the clear. I remember people talking about how Billy Joel had gone new wave and there are some tunes where he's playing things pretty close to the flavour of the day - then again a song like "Don't Ask Me Why" would have been right at home on his 1977 release The Stranger .  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight you can hear Billy Joel as he slowly moved with the times. Glass Houses was truly the logical successor to 52nd Street where songs like "Big Shot" and "My Life" to a lesser degree were setting the stage for what was to come. This was a guy who could basically do what he wan...

Like many people the first time I heard "Valotte" I was blown away hearing something so beautiful and mature from someone who sounded very much like his lionized father. It was a comparison that would be mentioned whenever the song was played on the radio. It was a great song. The follow up single "Too Late for Goodbyes" and the video for it were pretty cool, but it was the title track that held all the promise of great things to come. I didn't buy the album, but I heard it once at a friends place. It was more a cursory listen than anything, and it didn't make much of an impression. Reading up on the album now many of the reviewers were treating this like it was something released by Toto. They thought the music was too much like his father's later work, and that while his album was nicely produced, it felt old man and kind of limp. Of course these are poor paraphrases, but the general sense was this was a giant pile of "meh". There's no bu...