Over the next year Terje Fjelde has agreed to listen to nothing but David Foster on his iPod. He’s loaded the thing with over 1,200 songs produced, arranged, composed, and/or played by David Foster. A deal with the devil? He keeps wondering.
Hey, I’m back! Sort of. Just to set things straight: Gimmicky posts about insanity and snark aside, I really have been quite exhausted over the past few months, and for the last two weeks I have been unable to come up with the weekly 500 words about Mr. Foster that you’ve grown accustomed to. You see, on top of everything else, I’m experiencing a writer’s block. I’ve never encountered anything like it in my entire life, and it’s frustrating beyond belief. I literally have to fight for every single word, no matter how trivial it may seem. My words have dried out, my Twitter account is a desert and I can’t even come up with anything sensible for my Facebook status line anymore. Thank God I’m doing this stuff pro bono. Ah well, life imitates art as they say. Or is it the other way around? Is this what Jeff had in mind?
Anyway, I’ve been blunt about my current health status, so I might as well be blunt about the music. Here we go: David Foster composed the score for this movie in 1988, and I have to admit that I love the Stealing Home soundtrack. I love the sentimentality of it, I love that it’s overloaded with strings and sweet synth sounds and I love the silly love lyrics penned by Foster’s wife for the love theme. I’ve kissed a thousand beautiful women listening to these tunes throughout my youth — well, in my dreams, anyway.
I honestly don’t know where the unabashed love for this kind of kitsch came from, but it’s there and it’s always been there. It’s like a genetic thing, no matter how much I’ve gotten into hard bop and rock and roll in recent years, whenever I’m spinning Stealing Home I’m right back to the acne-infected sentimental sap that used to greet me in the mirror over 20 years ago. I have to face it — I’m a 37-year old guy who likes music that would embarrass 11-year-old girls for its sentimentality.
“And When She Danced (Love Theme from Stealing Home),” by David Foster and Marilyn Martin. From Stealing Home, 1988.
“Stealing Home (Reprise),” by David Foster. From Stealing Home, 1988.
To prove it, here are two selections from the Stealing Home soundtrack, a vocal track and a montage. On the vocal track David Foster sings a duet with Marilyn Martin, the lady who also did a duet with Phil Collins on Stephen Bishop’s “Separate Lives” for the White Nights soundtrack a couple of years earlier. And what a team on background vocals: Jason Scheff, Donny Osmond and Tim Feehan. The only missing link here is Jack Wagner. And you’ve got to love the backup band, it’s so 1980s:
Keyboards: David Foster
Fairlight drums and programming: Rhett Lawrence
Additional synthesizer programming: Rick Bowan, Michael Boddicker, David Foster, Bob Parr
Additional drum overdubs: Dave Reitzas
Guitars: Dean Parks, Michael Landau
Sax: Dave Boruff
So you have six guys on synth, two guitarists and a sax guy. Classic line-up — what a band. They probably looked a bit like this (inserting silly, pointless Photoshop montage to cut the post short. I hope to see you next week, and if I don’t, you know why):
The movie? I don’t remember.
Tags: David Foster, Into the Ear of Madness, Marilyn Martin, Terje Fjelde
