January 3, 2021 —– Chart #72
Hello Musical Friends,
Welcome to 2021! During the holidays, Chart of the Day weekly emails have been a little off schedule, but we have still managed to get one per week to your inbox. So let’s get 2021 off to a good start. Daniel Grayling Fogelberg (August 13, 1951 – December 16, 2007) was an American musician, songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. He is known for his 1980s songs, including “Longer” (1979), “Same Old Lang Syne” (1980), and “Leader of the Band” (1982). Today’s Chart of the Day is Longer.
Dan Fogelberg was born in Peoria, Illinois. He was the youngest of three sons born to Margaret (née Irvine), a classically trained pianist, and Lawrence Peter Fogelberg, a high school band director at Peoria’s Woodruff High School and Pekin Community High School. Dan’s mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father was of Swedish descent. His father would later be the inspiration for the song “Leader of the Band”. Dan often related his memory of his father allowing him to “conduct” the school band when he was only four years old. At the time, Fogelberg senior was band director at Bradley University in Peoria.
Using a Mel Bay course book, Dan taught himself to play a Hawaiian slide guitar that his grandfather had given him. He also learned to play the piano. At age 14, he joined a band, The Clan, which covered The Beatles. His second band was another cover band, The Coachmen, who, in 1967, released two singles written by Fogelberg. They were cut at Golden Voice Recording studio in South Pekin, Illinois, and released on Ledger Record’s label: “Maybe Time Will Let Me Forget” and “Don’t Want to Lose Her”.
After graduating from Woodruff High School in 1969, Fogelberg studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while playing local venues with a folk-rock band, The Ship. He began performing as a solo acoustic player in area cafes. One of these included the Red Herring, which is where he made his first solo recordings as part of a folk festival in 1971. He was discovered by Irving Azoff, who started his music management career promoting another Champaign-Urbana act, REO Speedwagon. Azoff sent him to Nashville, Tennessee, to hone his skills. There he became a session musician and recorded his first album with producer Norbert Putnam. In 1972, Fogelberg released his debut album Home Free to lukewarm response, although it eventually reached platinum status. He performed as an opening act for Van Morrison in the early 1970s.
“Longer” was written and recorded by Dan Fogelberg and released in 1979 by Full Moon Records and Epic Records. The song can be found on Fogelberg’s 1979 album Phoenix. It was also included on his 1982 greatest hits album as well as various other retrospective and compilation recordings.
Fogelberg, who had released more rock oriented songs throughout the 1970s, jokingly described “Longer” in the liner notes to one of his retrospective albums as “the song that put me on the elevators.” He wrote the song while vacationing in Maui, “lounging in a hammock one night and looking up at the stars. It just seems this song was drifting around the universe, saw me, and decided I’d give it a good home.” Accompanying Fogelberg’s vocals is an acoustic guitar (played by the singer) as well as a flugelhorn solo by Jerry Hey.
Lyrically, the song compares various events (“Longer than there’ve been stars up in the heavens”) with his emotional attachment to the one he loves (“I’ve been in love with you”). Longer became Fogelberg’s highest-charting hit of his career, spending two weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1980. It was kept from the summit the first week by “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen, and remained in the runner-up spot the next week behind “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd. In addition, “Longer” became the first of the singer’s four No. 1 songs on the Billboard adult contemporary chart between 1980 and 1984. The song reached No. 85 on the Billboard country music chart.
In the United Kingdom, “Longer” was Fogelberg’s only song to reach the UK Singles Chart, where it peaked at No. 59.
Keep rockin’ my friends,
Stan