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Vancouver's Loverboy is turning loose a new album, marking its first batch of original material in a decade.
The classic '80s arena rock group, which sold a collective 23-million albums worldwide, will release Six on Sept. 30, through CMC International/BMG Music Canada.
The band has been touring continuously in the U.S. the last four years, playing state fairs and 2,500 capacity clubs, and recently opening for ZZ Top in arenas, but it wanted to waited for the grunge era to fully pass until it even thought about releasing another studio album.
"We were incompatible and didn't feel we could participate in that kind of thing," says Reno via phone from Vancouver prior to leaving Friday for New York to resume Loverboy's Stateside tour.
The line-up has pretty well stayed intact since the band's 1980 self-titled debut: singer Mike Reno, guitarist Paul Dean, bassist Scott Smith and drummer Matt Frenette. Keyboardist Doug Johnson, who plays on several Six tracks, left recently to concentrate on studio work and starting a family. He has been replaced by Richard Sera, who has worked with Kim Mitchell, Sue Medley and Tom Cochrane.
Loverboy's last studio album was 1987's Wildside for CBS (now Sony). Touring ensued behind 1989's greatest hits package, Big Ones, before the band took some time off. In 1992, they reunited for a benefit concert, which kick-started its performance schedule.
Meanwhile, during the band's downtime back home in Vancouver, Reno and Dean started writing and recording at Dean's 48-track digital studio, Machine Works, stockpiling their songs until last winter, when they pieced together an album and finished it off.
During its spring and summer tours, they tested out the material on its fans. "We played all the songs actually but nailed it down to five songs each time 'cause everybody wants to hear the classic hits as well," Reno says referring to '80s singles like "Turn Me Loose" and "The Kid Is Hot Tonite".
Like many musicians, Reno says his new material is more "mature", both lyrically and musically. "We spent a lot of extra time on the lyrics to make sure we had something that could show maturity, showed some growth, and we didn't do massive amounts of overdubbing. We scaled it down to people in the band playing live, something we always did pretty close to, but stayed more close to on this album.
"We did some work with cellos on 'Secrets', we did some work with acoustics on 'Maybe Someday', and we actually used a percussion loop on a song called 'Tortured' that runs throughout the whole song with some keyboard undertones to it. The majority of the album is guitar-based. We used to have a lot of excess keyboards in there but we toned those back."
The first single is "Big Picture", a song about understanding the good and bad in a relationship. But Reno says that he just might not talking about the opposite sex in this case.
"It's a tongue-in-cheek situation which some people might think is about Loverboy and its audience over the last 17 years, but what it really is about is there's no way we (the band) can really split up. Because if you look at the big picture, we're really meant for each other."
Complete track listing for Six:
Big Picture
Love Of Money
Secrets
Waiting For The Night
Nobody Cares
Goodbye Angel
Create A Monster
Hair Of The Dog
Maybe Someday
Spinnin' My Wheels
So Much For Love
Tortured