Dan Fogelberg
While flipping through a box of old vinyl records the other day, I came across a copy of Dan Fogelberg’s Souvenirs. It had been my go-to album once, Fogelberg, a companion in the dark, at a time in my life when I felt horribly isolated. Many a night I would fall asleep with Souvenirs playing over and over without end into morning, his words and music both powerful and soothing in their simplicity. I held the album a spell, ran my hand over its worn cover and wallowed in nostalgia.
I decided right then and there to revisit this old love, undaunted by the blank looks I received from acquaintances when asked who I'd be writing on this week. "'Same Old Lang Syne'," I said. "You know, 'Met my old lover in the grocery store…'." Bingo! The song has become a Christmas classic of sorts over the years, even though its only association with the holiday is the mention of snow and that the encounter in the narrative ballad takes place on Christmas Eve. Everyone I talked to about Dan Fogelberg was familiar with the song, though few, the man behind it.
Although his career had never been especially flashy, nor had his name ever topped any “Best of” lists, Dan Fogelberg had quietly produced a substantial body of work as a singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist over a career that spanned nearly four decades. Best known for soft-rock classics like the wedding staple “Longer” and the tribute piece “Leader of the Band,” Fogelberg’s music was inspired by sources as diverse as folk, pop, rock, classical, jazz, and bluegrass. He had managed to carve himself a stylistic niche that was part folk-rock harmony, part blustery lyric realism, part romantic sensitivity and had eight consecutive albums go platinum or gold between the years 1975 and 1984.
Born Daniel Grayling Fogelberg on August 13, 1951, in Peoria, Illinois, Dan Fogelberg came from a musical family. His mother was a classically trained pianist, and his father was an established musician, teacher, and bandleader. His first instrument was the piano, which he took to well enough, but his personal musical turning point came in the early ‘60s, before he’d reached his teens, with a gift of an old Hawaiian guitar from his grandfather. The young Dan taught himself to play the instrument by using a Mel Bay course book and, inspired by the Beatles, began writing his own songs. By age 14, he had joined a band called The Clan, playing school events with a repertory that mainly consisted of Beatles songs.
By the time Fogelberg was in his mid-teens, he was listening to the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and was finding inspiration in songs by Gene Clark, Stephen Stills, Chris Hillman, Neil Young, and Richie Furay. His second group, The Coachmen, was yet another cover band. They started out doing Paul Revere & the Raiders-style dance-oriented R&B, but eventually evolved into a more progressive folk-rock outfit. In 1967 the band released two singles, “Maybe Time Will Let Me Forget” and “Don’t Want to Lose Her,” both of which were written by Fogelberg.
After graduating high school in 1969, Dan Fogelberg studied theater arts and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He began performing as a solo acoustic act in area coffeehouses and was discovered in 1971 by Irving Azoff, who was just starting his music-management career at the time. At Azoff’s urging, Fogelberg relocated to Los Angeles and then headed to Nashville, Tennessee, where he did some session work before recording his first album with producer Norbert Putnam. Although considered by critics to be a solid debut, Fogelberg’s 1972 release Home Free met with a tepid response due to its lack of a hit single but has since been certified Platinum as a re-issue.
Fogelberg's second effort was much more successful. Eighteen months after the release of Home Free, Fogelberg put out Souvenirs in 1974. "Part Of The Plan," his memorable first hit, featured a catchy hook, guitar playing by producer Joe Walsh, and backing vocals by Graham Nash, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner. The combination was enough to send Souvenirs straight into the Top 30.
Dan Fogelberg followed up Souvenirs with a string of gold and platinum albums including Captured Angel (1975), Nether Lands (1977), and the mostly instrumental Twin Sons of Different Mothers (1978), a collaborative effort between the singer and jazz flautist Tim Weisberg that featured the hit “The Power of Gold.” The ambitious effort proved the perfect mix of jazz-tinged instrumental music and folk- and country-inspired pop/rock.
Phoenix was next up in 1979. The album reached the Top 10 on the strength of the soft-rock hit “Longer,” which, holding at #2 for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1980, became the highest-charting hit of Dan Fogelberg’s career. “Longer” was kept from the top spot the first week by Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and remained in the runner-up spot the next week behind Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.”
Fogelberg reached his musical pinnacle in 1981 with the release of the ambitious double album The Innocent Age. Turning to the Thomas Wolfe novel Of Time and the River for inspiration, the singer managed to capture Wolfe's protagonist's search for meaning, for self, and the inexorable passage of time on the album, which included four of the musician’s biggest hits: “Leader of the Band,” an ode Fogelberg wrote about his former bandleader father; “Hard to Say,” about a lost love; “Run for the Roses,” which has since become the unofficial theme for the Kentucky Derby; and the autobiographical quasi Christmas song, “Same Old Lang Syne,” an account of the singer running into an old girlfriend. The Innocent Age was both a critical and commercial hit for the singer. It began a stretch of hits for Dan Fogelberg that had, for better or worse, come to define his sound for most people.
From that point, Fogelberg purposely shifted his musical approach several times—from exploring bluegrass and country on 1985's High Country Snows to some noticeable rocking on 1987's Exiles. Lyrically, the latter album was every bit as revealing as was The Innocent Age, but it failed to resonate with longtime fans. Exiles was the first record Fogelberg had made that didn't crack the Top 40 since Home Free. Unfortunately, he would not get there again in this lifetime.
Dan Fogelberg lost his battle with prostate cancer on December 16, 2007. I mourned his passing as if I had known him personally. Once upon a time, we shared a bond through the gift of his music and the profound comfort it provided me. As I held my copy of Souvenirs, I was reminded how missed he is in this world.
