Like a lot of music buyers back in the late ’70s and early ’80s – a pre-Compact Disc era when recession, market oversaturation, aversion to disco, and other factors sent record sales plummeting – I tried to make wise decisions with my limited funds. Between a half-decent allowance and the profits earned from selling Cokes at Virginia Tech football games (where a really warm day could bring as much as $40, not bad for a 12-year-old in 1978), I was able to buy a couple singles a week and a couple albums a month. I would try to make sure I didn’t duplicate my efforts; if I was considering buying a single, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t later buy the same song on an album.

As a result, my collection of singles (long since moved to the garage, the poor things) is mostly a hodgepodge of one-hit wonders and low-charting songs by mid-level artists. Most of them climbed into the Top 40, thereby escaping the fate of appearing in my Popdose colleague Dave Steed’s “Bottom Feeders” series, yet many of them are nearly forgotten now. Except, of course, on those few occasions when I fire up the ol’ turntable and put that plastic ring over the spindle – or when I dip into the “Jon’s Singles” folder in iTunes, where I’ve stashed the digital versions of those haphazardly stored, half-warped 45s of my youth.

This occasional series will give some of these singles a moment in the sun. I don’t promise you’ll like them – in some cases I no longer know what I was thinking when buying them – but nobody ever said nostalgia and quality have to go hand in hand…

Eddie Schwartz, “All Our Tomorrows” (1982)

Jim Bartlett, a part-time DJ and full-time memory bank who maintains the excellent radio-related blog The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, stole my thunder by posting this track just a few weeks ago. I’m doing it anyway, just because it’s the perfect representation of a type of song you almost never hear anymore: midtempo, keyboard-driven pop. (more…)