TOP 40 DEBUT: January 19, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #2 (March 15, 1980)
Dan Fogelberg arrived at the perfect moment for singer/songwriters. He released his debut record in 1972, a year whose big hits included “Heart Of Gold” and “Morning Has Broken.” His first million-selling album arrived in ’74, the year of “Annie's Song” and “Sundown”; his first Top 40 single came in ’75, the year of “At Seventeen” and “Cat’s In The Cradle.” Fogelberg was a poetic soul playing acoustic guitar at a time when the public couldn’t get enough of poetic, soulful, acoustic guitar players. He sold well, if not spectacularly; he built up a dedicated following, especially on college campuses. As tastes shifted and earnest acoustic acts fell out of fashion, it seemed all but certain that Fogelberg would fall out along with them.
By 1980, country was slick, Top 40 was slicker, and the folk scene was nonexistent. Legacy artists were either revamping their sound for a modern audience (Jackson Browne), fading away from radio (James Taylor), or doing both (Bob Dylan). The traditional singer/songwriter model was, for all intents and purposes, dead. But someone forgot to tell Dan Fogelberg. Three months into the new year, he scored the biggest hit of his career with a song that could’ve been written, recorded, and released a whole decade earlier. And it wasn’t an anomaly. “Longer” kicked off an uninterrupted streak of nine Top 30 singles in a row, an astonishing feat at a time when most of his peers had already been put out to pasture.
Fogelberg grew up in Peoria, Illinois in the early 1950s, the youngest son of two musical parents and a self-taught guitarist before the age of twelve. Like so many others in his generation, Dan fell hard for the Beatles; at age fourteen, he started his first band, mainly to play Lennon/McCartney covers at school dances. A couple years later, his second group, the Coachmen, recorded two original Fogelberg compositions for a 1967 local single. After the recording went nowhere, he decided to do the practical Midwestern thing and enroll at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Fogelberg was “discovered” in 1971 while playing a solo set for drunken frat boys at the Red Herring, a folk café right next to the college campus. Very few successful recording artists have been discovered while playing for drunken frat boys in Urbana, Illinois. But Fogelberg had fortune on his side. He managed to attract the attention of the only music business manager specializing in artists from the Urbana-Champaign area of Illinois: Irving Azoff. Azoff had just signed his first act, Champaign’s own REO Speedwagon, and was looking to expand. By the end of the decade, the Azoff roster would include Steely Dan, Heart, Stevie Nicks, and the Eagles. Again, Fogelberg was good, but he was also damn fortunate.
In 1972, Clive Davis brought two promising young singer/songwriters to Columbia Records. The first was Dan Fogelberg; the other was Bruce Springsteen. Like Springsteen, Fogelberg initially had a tough time translating his talent to record, and his debut—like Springsteen’s—failed to sell. So Azoff pulled some strings for his client, helping Dan land some high-profile gigs on sessions for Jackson Browne’s Late For The Sky and Joe Walsh’s So What.
Walsh and Fogelberg hit it off in the studio, leading to the former producing the latter’s second record. 1974’s Souvenirs featured appearances from three Eagles (Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner), one soon-to-be Eagle (Walsh, of course), and one guy from America (Gerry Beckley), an enviable guest roster that became the album’s main selling point. (Columbia printed complete credits for every song on the back cover.) Another all-star, Graham Nash, contributed prominent harmonies to the second single, “Part Of The Plan,” which peaked at #31 in March 1975. (It’s a 6.) Dan toured his album throughout the year, often opening shows for the Eagles, and eventually pushing Souvenirs to double platinum.
For the rest of the decade, Fogelberg remained a consistent, if not-quite-famous, presence in L.A.’s country-rock circles. His albums sold millions without generating hit singles; his was the smaller name on concert bills headlined by Linda Ronstadt, Browne, and the ubiquitous Eagles. And as the scene’s biggest acts began to ebb in popularity, it stood to reason that Dan would lose much of his audience as well. 1979’s Phoenix seemed to acknowledge these lower stakes: no splashy guest artists, few nods to contemporary production. Much of the album, like the anti-nukes teaser track “Face The Fire,” proudly sits three years behind the curve. I’d be surprised if anyone at Columbia thought its lead single—a quiet, pensive ballad with no drums whatsoever—would wind up going toe-to-toe with Queen and Pink Floyd on the Billboard Hot 100 and nearly emerge victorious.
“Longer” is a song out of time, a near-solo acoustic piece with no ties to folk, or country, or rock, or any real hybrid of the three. Its arrangement is fleshed out by harp and a string quartet; the most prominent instrument, besides Fogelberg’s fingerpicked guitar, is a flugelhorn. “Longer” unravels like a strand of gossamer, almost too delicate to actually touch. It barely lasts three minutes and feels like you’re holding your breath the entire time.
Music critics have retroactively classified “Longer” as “soft rock,” but there’s nothing here screaming “1980” (or 1970, for that matter). And I’m pretty sure that was by design. Fogelberg arranges the track in almost classical style; he’s aiming for chamber—rather than pop—music. In doing so, he lands on an intense kind of formality, far away from the specific reference points that tend to trap songs inside a particular cultural period. The closest comparison to “Longer” might be “Time In A Bottle,” Jim Croce’s posthumous #1 that felt equally unmoored from its own particular calendar year.
Croce has always been one of my favorite no-nonsense singer/songwriters, mainly because he never seemed too precious about his own compositions. Even on a song as abjectly gorgeous as “Time In A Bottle” (which is definitely a 10), his plain-spoken vocal grounds the production, never allowing the sweetness to congeal into rote sentimentality. That’s not really the case with Fogelberg. “Precious” is basically his default setting, sentimentality his stock in trade. And how you feel about his mannered delivery will probably determine whether you find “Longer” to be an exquisitely romantic paean or wallpaper Muzak.
Fogelberg had the inspiration for “Longer” while lying in a hammock, in Maui, next to his soon-to-be wife. That’s a pretty good headspace to be in when composing a love ballad, and he would later claim the song “wrote itself.” But paradoxically, I hear a lot of extra labor in the florid stiffness of the lyrics, which often read like the interior of a greeting card: “Stronger than any mountain cathedral/ Truer than any tree ever grew/ Deeper than any forest primeval/ I am in love with you.” As the purest form of a Stereotypical Wedding Song, though, “Longer” is basically perfect: “Longer than there’ve been stars up in the heavens/ I’ve been in love with you.” Nothing reinforces eternal vows like the assertion that this particular coupling both overrides and predates the entirety of creation.
I respect Fogelberg as a craftsman, and I respect the craft involved in creating “Longer.” There’s not a single note out of place, no misguided production choices, not one trace of messy imperfection. And that’s probably why I can’t make an emotional connection. Dan Fogelberg wrote a genuinely beautiful piece of music, one that became the biggest hit of his career, but he forgot to leave a way for the listener to get inside. The great love songs make you feel something: joy, sadness, longing, heartbreak. “Longer” just keeps you at arm’s length. Like a pretty painting in a museum exhibit, it exists only behind glass.
GRADE: 4/10
BONUS BITS: One rarely connects Dan Fogelberg to the smooth sounds of Nineties R&B, but uber-producer Babyface makes a credible case with his incredibly faithful version of “Longer,” taken from his 2007 covers album Playlist.