Trends change. After a three album run of success, Loverboy were out of style by the time Lovin’ Every Minute of It arrived in 1985. The album still performed well but it fell off the radar pretty quickly and is often regarded as inferior to the band’s early classics. Is that fair? I decided to give it a spin.
Front-loading the hit single at the beginning proves wise. Written by “Mutt” Lange for the band, “Lovin’ Every Minute of It” is the best song on the album by a country mile and the video remains a classic example of MTV circa 1985: have band perform with a lot of women hanging around. The song has remained stuck in my head for a few weeks now.
Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain helped with the ballad “This Could Be the Night” which isn’t surprising when you hear the song. It’s a solid, if unspectacular, ballad that could have fit nicely into a Journey set list at the time. The band enlisted fellow Canadian Bryan Adams for “Dangerous” which would be a decent rocker if the dated synths weren’t lathered all over it.
Perhaps the most interesting song is “Lead A Double Life” which has a jagged, New Wave tone that sounds truly unique. However, it only adds to the unfocused direction of the album. Loverboy’s success gave them the opportunity to spend more money trying new things in the studio and every single one of them ended up on Lovin’ Every Minute of It.
The band never really went away and continue to grind it out on the heritage circuit. Their 2014 album Unfinished Business turned up the guitars and would have been the perfect follow-up to the first three albums that made them superstars. Is it time for a Loverboy resurgence? Probably not but I’ll be keeping an eye out for those first three albums on vinyl.