The Circle Era

Over the last weekend I listened to the whole Circle album again. That album is definitely a drum focused album. The drums are huge! And such a big driving factor. Apart from WWBTF, every song has absolutely driving drums. Love the drum sound too, not the snare though. Sounds awful, but the Tom's sound amazing! Tico did a great job on the album.

I'll never understand why they spent years overplaying WWBTF while ignoring Thorn In My Side.

One was the lead single, the other an album track.

As far as the album goes: Thorn in My Side, Brokenpromiseland and Learn to Love are very good. Bullet and Born To Follow are good. The latter especially has grown on me; some really pretty instrumentation on that track (I wonder if the shitty initial solo soured the reception?).

For an album that was more or less an accident, it surely has held up nicely.

The Circle was the last decent album imo. The only two songs I feel compelled to skip are When We Were Beautiful which bores me to tears and Learn To Love, which is nothing great to start with but the halle, halle parts are annoying and kills it dead for me.

Call me cynical but I didn't buy the whole thing about adding the solo because of the uproar from the fans. I think they always had the solo recorded and always planned on releasing the solo-less version first to radio. They just spun it as that for a PR stunt. After Lost Highway they were trying to win back the rock audience, and talking about guitar solos probably seemed like a good idea.

I couldn't even find the solo-less version on Youtube, it doesn't seem like that one got a proper release in the end. If that was always the plan, it certainly went over worse than they'd assumed

There were promo singles with the version pressed and party shipped out, I used to have one of them. Richie even was quoted that he was emulating some Beatle-esque kind of vibe 'cause he was in the mood the day they originally recorded it. And still, while listening to the final version, I get the feeling that the solo was inserted afterwards 'cause the mixes don't seem to match 100%. If it was done on purpose right off the bat, it was a poor job with regards to that.

It was the version that was played on the radio at the time and it was also the version on the commercially released CD singles internationally. It kinda gives it away though that the instrumental version on the CD single featured the guitar solo, even though the main track didn't...

I think, *think* both versions are on spotify, no idea if they took it down or not.....

https://youtu.be/2WPGMZAhi5w?feature=shared


The original version of WWBTF.