Songoftheday 3/13/14 - Looking in a child's eye there's no hate and there's no lie, there's no black and there's no white...

Rick Springfield - "Celebrate Youth"
from the album Tao (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #26 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6

Today's Song of the Day is by Australian singer/songwriter/actor Rick Springfield, who had parlayed his role on the popular American soap opera General Hospital and a hitmaking music career into a starring role in the movie Hard To Hold, with a soundtrack that spun off three top-40 hits. After that, Mercury Records bought off Rick's older work at the Sound City studios and remixed it with a new band and put a single into the Top-40 with "Bruce" in 1985 (without the artist's consent).

In the spring of that year Rick released his fifth album for RCA, Tao, and for the first single, the synth-heavy dance-rock jam of "Celebrate Youth"...

"Celebrate Youth" made it into the top-40 of the pop chart in America in May of 1985. Internationally, the single went to #5 in Germany and #39 in Canada.

I guess the combo of overproduction and Rick being 36 and singing about youth kept the record from continuing his streak of top-10 hits from his albums' first singles. But I guess I was an outlier since I always leaned towards the "overproduced" busy-type songs (which lent to the "freestyle" dance pop movement)...

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's Rick on tour in Germany in 1985...

...and finally, what's an 80s post without a Solid Gold lipsynch?

Up tomorrow: A British/American hybrid rock band that wasn't Foreigner goes for some solar steps.