Air Supply - Lost in Love 1980 - Review
I am starting this blog to hopefully advance my career in music photography, but also to share what some music that I like means to me and this first series, I will be listening to the vinyl records I own and talking about what I feel the music is about and makes me feel. I will also hope to learn about critiquing music through this.
I will be going alphabetically by artist in my collection. The first album up, Air Supply with Lost in Life from 1980. Once, as my brother was going through my albums asked why I had an Air Supply album. I said because I’m all out of love. He looked at me, screwed up his face, shook his head, then just put the album back and walked away.
Until today, I had never listened to this album. The only song I knew from it was All Out of Love. I only knew that because in about 2006 I worked in a kitchen at a bar/nightclub in Cardiff, Wales and we listened almost exclusively to power ballads, and All Out of Love was on almost all those compilations.
Today, I listened to the album, and I guess as a person who doesn’t know anything about writing music and lyrics, I feel they did very well what they set out to do and wrote an album about the loss of love and the struggle to come to terms with that loss. There seem to be three group types of song on this album which express the emotions/stages of recognition of the state of the relationship.
Group one is what I want to call the adult-contemporary ballads. Those are the first three tracks: Lost in Love, All out of Love and Every, and Every Woman in the World. I like the progression of those three songs going from the narrator, at least how I visualize it, telling they’re love interest ‘I’m all about you and you’re all I think about’ in Lost in Love, then trying to atone for their mistake in All Out of Love. I think the character then tries to be asking their jilted lover to remember how they fell for each other when they first met and that feeling of love.
The first song I feel is in group two, which are the up-tempo songs, is Just Another Woman. It has more of a rock beat to it than group one and is a more up tempo. I feel the song conveys is that what the partner thinks happened, didn’t. The narrator is trying to explain that a woman he has known is just any other woman now and doesn’t matter, but their explanation falls on deaf ears. To me, American Hearts is in the same vein of Just another woman in tempo and beat. It opens the set of side two with hope that these two may reconcile.
Now we must jump to group three, the slow ballads, for the last song on side 1. Having You Near Me slows everything right down. It’s a very somber song in my opinion. They’re still trying to tell their partner that they have so much more to give to the relationship if only they have another chance. But I wonder how many chances they’ve been given. Chances, again changes in tempo and is slower than the previous song, American Hearts. I think the song’s narrator still thinks there’s an opportunity to rekindle the romance and still doesn’t realize that the relationship is over.
Back to group 2 with the last two songs in this group which are Old Habits Die Hard, and I can’t Get Excited. In Old Habits Die Hard, I feel the narrator of the album is in complete denial about the state of the relationship and maybe a bit delusional about the chances of reconciliation.
The album ends with My Best Friend. I feel they’re reminiscing about the relationship while finally realizing that reconciliation and recoupling are finally beyond reach.
As a fan of ballads, this album is full of them and the story I get listening to this album, I feel we get to hear basically all five stages of grief in 10 songs. The change of tempo and beat in these songs to elicit my sympathy to their breakup works. It involves you and you can’t help but empathize with the narrator because we’ve all been in these situations. My only issue is that the narrator doesn’t seem to reflect on the fact that they may have been the reason for the failed relationship.
Most of my reviews will probably be more like this. Talking about my interpretation of the songs and how I feel the album flows. As I continue through, I plan on learning more about critiquing the actual music and combining that into these reviews. I thank you for taking the time to read my interpretation of what I feel is an overlooked album.
Album Score - 🥁🥁🥁
Scores will be out of 5 🥁
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