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| From | William Rabeneck <largro13@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: Subject: If there are any AOR fans on the list (and you're willing to out yourself as such) |
| Date | Sun, 8 Apr 2007 08:30:13 -0700 (PDT) |
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While I know it's not fashionable, I like a lot of what I call AOR. I like tunes by REO Speedwagon, Journey, Foreigner, Honeymoon Suite, Bryan Adams, Night Ranger, late 1980s Heart, etc... In fact, I find a lot of cross over between what people term AOR, and other genres. The Hard Rock/Hair Metal power ballad seems to be a form of AOR, to me, even though their harder-faster tunes don't classify as AOR in my mind. And some Power-Pop bands attempts at being a little more hard rocking for radio play, when it was fashionable to be more hard rocking, those attempts seem sort of AOR to me.
I'm not sure how everyone else is classifying AOR; but to me, it seems that the average AOR band was a Hard Rock band that was a little more in love with clean recording-production, than they were in love with Rock-N-Roll swagger or songwriting for that matter. Don't get me wrong, there are AOR songs that are written as well as any song out there; but in general it seems to me that the AOR bands mindsets skewed towards thinking that if they had a clean, pristine sounding recording they had 80-percent of the thing whipped - swagger and songwriting be damned. Not that pristine production is bad; it just seems that if they knew they had that much, they rested on their laurels on the other parts of the deal, sometimes.
And that may be part of the thing, I know I've expressed the same thought before about Hair Metal; a lot of the AOR (and Hair Metal) bands seemed to think that if they had two or three really stellar songs, the rest of the album could be filled with B level (and less) songs. It's not that they didn't know good songs when they'd written one, or had one written for them; but it's that they didn't seem to have the patience to write, or in the case of those who hired songs written, didn't want to buy a whole set of good songs, in order to release an album of ten or twelve really excellent songs. A few super hits, and a lot of rubish-filler seems to be where a lot of these albums fell. But the super hits where as good as anything out there. And that's not to say that there weren't a small percentage of the AOR albums that were solid across the board.
I'm just trying to recall the titles of some nice AOR songs (hadn't given this any thought until three minutes ago):
"Midnight Blue" - Lou Gramm
"Alone" - Heart
"I Want To Know What Love Is" - Foreigner
"Open Arms" - Journey
"Keep On Lovin' You" - REO Speedwagon
"Once The Feeling" - Honeymoon Suite
"Sister Christian" - Night Ranger
"Heaven" - Bryan Adams
"Kick The Wall" - Jimmy Davis & Junction
"Missing You" - John Waite
"Faithfully" - Journey
"Hold On To The Night" - Richard Marx (not sure? But that's who I think)
"Heart And Soul" - John Kilzer
"The Night To Remember" - Loverboy
There's more good ones I'm not thinking of. Though they didn't have a high percentage batting average (great songs to crap), you can't totally dismiss the genre, it produced some good stuff.
There's still stuff that Auditeers like today that comes close to this mark - I mean the best AOR singles (not the rubish). I can hear a touch of AOR in the work of Keane, Splitsville, Crash Into June, the Posies, Destroyer, the New Pornographers, and others. These groups may not specialize in AOR; but from one, two, or more of their songs, I'm guessing that someone in the band at least owned (and played pretty heavily) a single or two that would rank as AOR.
Peace,
W.D.
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