Dave's Song of the Day
You Can Do Magic – America
Thursday song of the day: Today’s song was a comeback hit for this popular 1970s soft rock group.
The singing trio America was a popular act in the early- and mid-1970s, starting off with their debut single
A Horse with No Name hitting #1 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. The hits continued for a few years, including several in the Top Ten and another #1 with
Sister Golden Hair in 1975. In the late 1970s, however the hits dried up.
In 1982, America was now a duo of Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell as the other founding member, Dan Peek, had left. The band hadn’t had a Top 40 hit in six years, despite releasing three albums since then. Previously, America had written most of their own songs, but this changed in the 1980s after the band started to fade commercially. When working on their newest album,
View from the Ground, they enlisted the help of songwriter and producer Russ Ballard at the suggestion of an executive from their record label. Ballard had started his career as guitarist and lead singer for the band Argent. He had sung on Argent’s biggest hit,
Hold Your Head Up, in 1972 and later went on to write for Argent and many other artists. By the late 1970s, he was more known as a writer and producer than as a recording artist, particularly with his work for KISS. (Two Russ Ballard compositions have been Song of the Day before,
New York Groove on March 1st, 2020 here:
New York Groove – Hello and
I Know There’s Something Going On on August 3rd, 2020 here:
I Know There’s Something Going On – Frida ) While Ballard’s roots were in harder rock, he was also comfortable writing softer songs. For America’s 1982
View from the Ground album, he wrote two songs,
Jody and
You Can Do Magic. He also produced those tracks on the album, as well as playing guitar, bass, and keyboards and providing backing vocals.
You Can Do Magic was the first single from the album and climbed to #8 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart. This made it America’s first Top 40 hit since 1976 and reestablished them as a popular band after several years of fading popularity.
With the success of
You Can Do Magic, America asked Russ Ballard to produce their entire next album, 1983’s
Your Move. This time, Ballard probably had too much control for their tastes, as he wrote most of the songs, played most of the instruments, and generally took control of the entire project. America’s Gerry Beckley explains, “We thought we were involved in the process, but [when] we got over to London [Ballard] had cut a lot of the songs that we had nixed, and it became apparent that it was going to be a kind of 75/25 thing, where most of the songs were going to be his. So we were very removed from this album. We did our best to sing these songs as good as we could, but even on the songs we wrote, he basically played all the instruments.” While a Ballard-penned song from that album,
The Border, went to #33 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart, America used different producers and songwriters for subsequent albums.
Audio
View: https://youtu.be/M-Z3BAW7o3c
Video
View: https://youtu.be/tt4cR9szMS8
Tomorrow: Believing the things you say