Album: Mavericks
Year: 1991
. . .
In case you don’t recognize the names, Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey were the co-founders and principal songwriters of The dB’s, the legendary east coast power pop band who started out their career with two great albums, 1981’s Stands for Decibels and 1982’s Repercussion before Stamey left in 1992.
While Stamey released some solo albums, Holsapple carried on as the main songwriter of the dB’s, and while things took a hit on 1984’s Like This, I still think that their fourth album, 1987’s The Sound of Music is one of the greatest power pop albums of all time.
After that, Peter Holsapple joined R.E.M. as a touring musician, supporting them during the Green world tour and during the recording of (and acoustic shows supporting) Out of Time.
And at some point during 1990, he started recording songs again with Chris Stamey for the first time in nearly a decade, and in 1991, the pair put out an album called Mavericks. I’ll admit this: I haven’t listened to Mavericks in a couple of decades at least, and that’s because I thought it was only OK during a year that is still my all-time favorite for music.
I think that the reason was that I was looking for another power-pop album — it had been four years since Like This — and that’s not where their heads were at: Mavericks was more of low-key, acoustic-oriented record. And possibly one I would like more now than I did back then.
That said, there was one song I well and truly loved, the gorgeous duet “I Know You Will.”
Driven by an insistent acoustic guitar and drums that sound like drum machines (unless it’s drum machines that sound like drums), I know you will gets by on the etherial Hosapple & Stamey harmonies and a floating-on-air feeling.
And there’s a couple of times where the song breaks down, and they sing “like gravity / like oxygen” while the acoustic guitar plays a harmonic, and it’s just too pretty for words.
Holsapple & Stamey did another one of these records, 2009’s hERE aND nOW, which I enjoyed a lot, and of course, the dB’s eventually reunited and put out the excellent Falling Off The Sky in 2012. So I should really check Mavericks out again.
“I Know You Will”
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