The Making of Lovin' Every Minute Of It

Loverboy Fan Club News (Spring 1985)

On Lovin' Every Minute Of It, it's the songs, the production and the energy that are better than ever . . .With a hot new producer and three and a half months of high-voltage sessions, that certainly make sense.

The boys are very pleased with Tom Allom, and give him full credit for making it an enjoyable as well as great sounding record.

"We had a lot of fun doing this album." says Paul. "Tom's great. The thing I liked best was his enthusiasm. He really got excited about the music. Mike Shipley was really a good technician and a fabulous engineer and a great guy but he never really got excited. Tom's into it--he really loves it and puts excitement into it."

"He's hilarious, too," he grins. "him and Reno. I went to see Eddie Murphy and he was great, but I swear I laughed harder at the studio."

Tom endeared himself to the band even more as it became clear the record they were making was very special. But Tom tells us it was just the boys' talents showing through.

He says: "When this band works properly, it's magic! The energy comes out in a big way on this record, but it's still really musical. The songs are great. The arrangements are full and they feature everybody. This is like a guitar record but there's masses of great keyboard lines and a lot of keyboard hooks rather than just washing chords."

"And", adds Paul, "we've put some big backing vocals on it which we've never done before. Some of the tracks have a hundred voices--which you can do by recording five guys 20 times. We had a couple of guys from Black and Blue and some guys from around town like Ray and Marc from Trooper. Tom sang on a couple of things, and Scott is singing now."

Like finding a producer, the band took their time and got just the right tracks. With three multi-million sellers under their belts and no real deadline pressure, they could afford to experiment. They could afford perfection.

Says Paul: "We could say 'aw that didn't work, big deal, we'll try something else'. We had the time, the equipment and the inclination to make it the best it could be. We didn't have to make any compromises."

Of course initially, the biggest concentration was on the songs. Paul gives us the scoop . . .

"In the past," he says, "it's been mainly me and Mike writing with some input from the other guys and only occasional bits from the odd outsider. With the new record, there's been more outside influences, which usually makes it more interesting and diverse, particularly lyrically. Two guys especially helped us out with lyrics. Davitt Sigerson, a writer we found, and Bill Wray, a friend of the band's from Baton Rouge."

"Mutt Lange--he's produced the Cars, Foreigner, AC/DC and wrote Billy Ocean's Loverboy among other stuff--wrote the title song, our first single. Mike Shipley had worked with Mutt on Foreigner and the Cars, and I guess he told him that we're always looking for songs so Mutt wrote a tune specifically for us."

"There are so many people involved. Another one is Patrick Mahassen, who used to play in Krokus. He got us started on a song called Friday Night."

"Terry Manning, who's worked with ZZ Top, brought us a song by two Nashville writers that we rewrote into Fuel for the Fire. Mike came up with the title and Davitt and I wrote the lyrics."

"Scott and Bill wrote a really good ballad called Destination Heartbreak. I think I came up with a chord change, so maybe Scott will give me a credit."

"The four songs I wrote on the album, I actually wrote on stage during my guitar solo last tour. They were just little pieces then. I'd go and warm up in the tuning room by myself for a couple of hours and work out the riffs. I'd try them out that night live."

"Except my ballad's been around awhile. I started it the same day as Teenage Overdose and finished it this summer with my friend, Jonathan Caine from Journey. It's probably going to be called Could Be the Night."

"Bullet In The Chamber we actually played when we opened for Kiss in our very first concert. It was this happy little pop song--happier than 'Workin' for the Weekend'. We decided to do something a little more suitable to the title so we changed it all around. Now it cooks. It's a heavy guitar tune with a lot of percussion--totally unrecognizable from the original."

"Steal the Thunder, I wrote most of it about a year and a half ago. Davitt and Bill have a lot of the lyrics on that. It's probably my personal favorite on the album. There's a pretty decent guitar solo on it. I don't think it's a single, though. It's too heavy and aggressive."

"Too Much Too Soon was a song Bill and I wrote upstairs in my house. That stemmed from a guitar solo on stage."

"Double Life is Doug's tune. I had a song called 'Fever Pitch'--I wrote the chords and Mike wrote the verse--and Doug had 'Double Life' with the same pattern in the verse. So we were looking for a melody and we just stumbled across the Fever Pitch melody and stuck that in. I came up with 'Lead a double life . . . comes alive at night'. . . There's a lot of writers on that one."

"So those are the songs that will probably be on the album. We're looking forward to playing all of them live."

"let me tell ya, we can hardly wait . . . "