There are some albums that connect with you in such a deep, profound way that even when the industry washes their hands of them, the bond between you and the music remains strong.
As time passes by, you find yourself grabbing copies of the album anytime you see one at a rummage sale, used record store or flea market for mere pennies. Then one night, many years after the album's initial release, as you're listening to desert radio static on yet another cross-country tour, a familiar melody beckons to you like a lover from the past, but the voice belongs to someone else...
"Holy crap, is that Annie Lennox?" you ask yourself.
The song goes on to become a gigantic smash hit in the U.S. and around the world, securing a Grammy statuette for Ms. Lennox in the process. Soonafter, used copies of The Lover Speaks' self-titled CD begin selling for ungodly amounts on eBay, yet no one in the industry thinks to re-issue the album.
The year was 1986 so, unbeknownst to many at the time, we'd already stepped headlong into the "ass end days of the '80s". While there were probably more great albums being made than at any other time in recent music history, there was also more hideous crap than ever infiltrating the charts.
By then, MTV had the music industry on a short leash. No band broke big in those days without the cable network's support.
Hooky as each chorus may have been, this strange album unfolded like a storybook, with singer David Freeman acting more as narrator/tour guide than singer/frontman.
Combined with the odd band name and the overly ornate album packaging, what you had was an album too clever for its own good by far. Was this a band, a soundtrack, or some oddball one-off side project I asked myself as I absorbed the album during my days as a record store clerk.
One day, after hearing the album for the fourth or fifth time, I finally vacated my post in the store's cassette section to venture to the front of the store where the in-store turntable was located. Grabbing the album cover, I scanned the credits looking for something that could help me make sense of what I was hearing.
The first name that caught my eye was that of producer Jimmy Iovine. I then saw that guitars had been provided by Eurythmic Dave Stewart, Toto's Steve Lukather, and the E Street Band's newest member at the time, Nils Lofgren.
Seeing these names did little to help me make sense of things.
While the lyrics were filled with darkly cinematic prose, with each song bursting forth like one bombastic hook-filled chorus, it was the playful, and highly effective use of female backing vocals as counterpoint to Freeman's that gave each track its emotional kick and sets the album apart to this day.
On "Every Lover's Sign", "Love Is 'I Gave You Everything'", and "No More 'I Love You's'", the vocals of June Miles-Kingston come dangerously close to stealing the spotlight from Freeman's jovial protagonist, but it is that interplay that gives the album a memorably theatrical feel.
And just as quickly as this big beat opera of a rock album had entered my life, both album and band were gone.
Months later, Alison Moyet, who knows a little bit about being shunned in the U.S., herself, recorded a song called "Sleep Like Breathing". Written by Freeman and his bandmate in The Lover Speaks, Joseph Hughes, the song appeared on Moyet's Raindancing album. In some parallel universe, one believes, this song would wind up doing for Moyet what "No More 'I Love You's'" had done for Lennox.
Sadly, and inexplicably, the tune failed to crack the Top 40 in the UK and made even less of a splash in the States, where Moyet was being as neglected by CBS Records as The Lovers Speaks had been by A&M.
The Lover Speaks recorded a second album, The Big Lie, which was co-produced by Daniel Lanois, before being buried by A&M before it was even released. Thankfully, for the curious, it is on Youtube.
The album's atmospheric production lies in stark contrast to the group's debut, embracing a more ambient direction with songs that evoke a haunting longing but admittedly lack notable choruses, whereas the first album had essentially been one big chorus.
Only in the ensuing years did I come to discover that Freeman and Hughes were members of The Flys, whose "Love And A Molotov Cocktail" single I had nabbed sight unseen from the import section as a kid back in Michigan. Freeman's vocals sound almost unrecognizable at first and the band's brash pop punk sensibilities have zero in common with The Lover Speaks.
Granted, eight years had passed between projects.
Even more years had passed between my owning copies of The Lovers Speaks on CD so when Cherry Pop announced plans to re-issue the album complete with bonus tracks in 2015, I was beside myself, but the remastered version of the album was even more stunning than I could have anticipated. It also reawakened an age old mystery as to how such a beautifully crafted album could have escaped the public's ear to such a large extent.