"Foreplay/Long Time"

Hell, everyone hates Boston these days. Overblown, indulgent guitar frenetics, they call it. Pompous orchestral self-gratification, they sneer. Bugger that. For one album, one moment in time, Boston was everything you needed to know about AOR/MOR/FM rock. This is a meaty, sweaty air-guitar must-have. Yeah, most people go for "More Than a Feeling" and its soaraway chorus, but this is far, far better. "Foreplay" is like listening to the Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with amplification and extra cannons, pure classical filtered through Marshall amps, and "Long Time" is just that bit more. You can almost see Tom Scholz hard at work at his kitchen table, plotting every last second of this epic, grandiose song, down to the last drum fill, the last hi-hat. More often than not, a song is "epic" because of the sentiment, the passion of the performance, but this is a "planned" epic, a carefully-crafted piece of virtuosity. The guitar sound is the by-now standard Boston squall, complemented by heavy work on the cymbals, and Brad Delp's contained vocal resting easy on top of the wall of noise. But it WORKS! For some reason, this is the ultimate driving song, the perfect tennis-raquet-and-bedroom-mirror workout, with two or three great guitar solos for that special wig-out.