Songoftheday 2/23/15 - I've heard talk of blind devotion, lovers through thick and thin...

"Is This Love" - Survivor
from the album When Seconds Count (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 13

Today's Song of the Day comes from the rock band Survivor, who had scored their second big hit from the Rocky film franchise when "Burning Heart" from Rocky IV hit #2 in the winter of 1986. At the end of the year, the band released their second album with new lead singer Jimi Jamison, When Seconds Count. The first single, "Is This Love", written by band guitarist Frankie Sullivan and keyboardist Jim Peterik, followed that mainstream bread-and-butter workhorse rock they have been successful with but haven't really grown from...

"Is This Love" became Survivor's fifth and final top-10 pop hit in January of 1987. The single also crossed over to both the Mainstream Rock (#27) and Adult Contemporary (#25) charts, proving their ability to straddle the line between power and safety in listeners' ears. It would be the only single from the album to make the pop top=40. They released a follow-up album, Too Hot To Sleep, in 1988, and while "Didn't Know It Was Love" scraped the top-40 on the mainstream rock chart, it was only a minor pop hit, as was their next single, "Across The Miles", which did manage to climb to #16 on the Adult Contemporary list. 

After a greatest hits set Jamison left the band for a solo career, and since then both he and former lead singer Dave Bickler had been shuffling in an out of the band's touring schedule. Sadly, Jamison died in September of last year from a stroke exasperated by drug use.

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Here's the band performing the song live in Japan in 1987...

Up tomorrow: British progressive pop stars get some help from some puppets.