In music, a canon can refer to a compositional technique where a melody is staggered across several

melodic parts, creating an echoing layered effect. However, a canon doesn't always mean that. Sometimes

a cannon is just a piece of artillery that you load with gunpowder and light on fire.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music.

I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad you've joined me to talk about music written to be a canon, music written while listening to a canon, and sometimes music that just involves firing off a canon.

This is a 100% independent podcast.

I make every episode by myself, and I'm entirely supported by listeners like you.

I don't know about you, but I'm sick of watching things I like, be acquired and ruined.

And thanks to all of you, that will not happen with strong songs.

On this episode, we're firing up the heart machine

and turning the knobs to 10 for a melodramatic opus

that helped define the power ballad for a generation.

It's one of those songs that only could have happened in the 1980s.

So, let's dial up the reverb, load up the cannons, and do this thing.

Music verb, load up the cannons and do this thing. I have talked about big songs on this show in the past,

songs with huge sounds mixed to evoke massive spaces,

songs with equally massive lyrics,

with huge emotions so broad and evocative that you feel invited to move in, stretch out, and find

whatever meaning you want.

Not coincidentally, a lot of the biggest songs that I've covered on strong songs were recorded

in the 1980s, a decade when big was very much in, when new studio techniques, reverb technologies,

and broader trends in popular taste,

...