Songoftheday 11/2/13 - Those summer nights when we were young, we bragged of things we'd never done we were dreamers...

Dennis DeYoung - "Desert Moon"
from the album Desert Moon (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12

Today's Song of the Day is by singer Dennis DeYoung, who had shared lead vocal duties in the arena rock band Styx for fourteen years before the band going on hiatus after a live album and dismally shitty single "Music Time". In 1984 Dennis released his debut solo set Desert Moon. The lead single, in the soft-rock ballad genre he was drifting towards, came with a video with a very weird cold opening...

Dennis lived in the land of the feathered hair.

"Desert Moon" became DeYoung's first and only top-40 single, reaching the top ten on the pop chart in November of 1984. The follow-up single, "Don't Wait For Heroes" stalled down at #83 (it had been bigger in my neck of the woods), and a second album only placed its single "Call Me" at #54, though it went top-5 on the adult-contemporary (easy-listening) format chart in 1986.

Three years later, and Dennis would regroup with Styx (without member Tommy Shaw, who had gone on to Damn Yankees), and again scale into the top-10 with "Show Me The Way".

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...and here's Dennis with a live acoustic take on "Desert Moon" from 2009..

Up tomorrow: A Scottish lass walks with sass.