The Long Road Back

Paul Laine could hardly have chosen a better title.

The Long Road Back arrives thirty-six years after Stick It In Your Ear, the 1990 Elektra debut that put him in Little Mountain Sound with Bruce Fairbairn at the height of Fairbairn's run. Laine was barely twenty. He had a major label, Bruce Allen's organization and two Canadian chart singles, and within eighteen months the business had moved on to something else. No second Elektra album followed. Can't Get Enuff came out in Europe on Escape Music in 1996, and after that his voice spent three decades working mostly under other names.

Danger Danger heard Stick It In Your Ear and hired him in 1993, and he stayed eleven years. Then came Shugaazer, Darkhorse, a Vancouver studio, music for film and television, The Defiants with Bruno Ravel and Rob Marcello, and in 2024 the lead singer's job in Trooper, next to Paul Gogo and Scott Brown from his 1990 band.

The Long Road Back draws on the same melodic rock vocabulary as the debut, from a singer who has spent another three and a half decades working inside it. It is big, guitar-driven melodic rock with stacked harmonies and large choruses, and it keeps the harder edge Laine brought to Danger Danger and The Defiants. It sounds current and makes no effort to hide where it comes from.

What sets it apart from the band records is that nothing stands between Laine and the songs. Danger Danger already existed when he arrived, and Trooper carries one of the most recognizable names in Canadian rock. Here the name on the cover is his own, and so is most of the work. He sings, plays keyboards, acoustic guitar and most of the rhythm guitar, engineered the sessions and co-produced with Bruno Ravel. Ravel plays bass, Scotty "Hooch" Taylor plays drums and Andrew Oye takes the lead guitar on all but one song, where Michael Schau steps in. Kolten Laine adds backing vocals. The record was cut at The Church Studios in Vancouver, the city where his solo career started.

Ravel is the thread running through it. The two have worked together since Danger Danger hired Laine and built The Defiants on that partnership. Here Ravel co-produces, plays bass and shares the writing on one song. Oye co-wrote another, and everything else is Laine's alone.

The choruses are still large, because that was always one of his strengths, and the guitars stay up front without crowding the vocal. Traces of the polished rock world that made his first album run all through it, yet none of it plays as a 1990 revival. A record like this is easy to sell as a return to the glory days, and Laine has too much history for that. The record carries the experience of Danger Danger, The Defiants and the years Laine spent writing and producing for other people.

Stick It In Your Ear caught Paul Laine at the start, when everything was still supposed to happen. The Long Road Back comes from someone who knows what actually did.

-Robert Williston