Boston Come Back
Seventies arena-rock stars Boston return on November 5th with
Corporate America, their first album of new material since
1995’s Walk On. The album features the return of original
lead vocalist Brad Delp and the addition of new members, guitarist
Anthony Cosmo and bassist Kimberley Dahme.
“There’s a new flavor to this CD,” says Tom Scholz, Boston’s
multi-instrumentalist, producer and principal songwriter. “There’s
been a fair amount of maturing, and the introduction of Anthony and
Kimberley has changed things.”
Cosmo impressed Scholz with his rhythm guitar playing on a demo
featuring his father — Boston guitarist Fran Cosmo — while Dahme
was invited into the fold after Scholz caught a gig by her former
band. Both quickly integrated themselves into Boston in a way that
few members have, writing four songs for the album between
them.
“I was amazed and really excited about the prospect of having
someone else contribute,” says Scholz, an MIT graduate and inventor
of the Rockman, a portable amplifier. “To have someone else make
this kind of contribution, it’s never been something I’ve had
before. The weight of responsibility of writing an album had always
fallen entirely on me. Usually someone would have another song from
some other place, but this is the first time I had some real help
with somebody whose work I was really impressed with.”
Of the four and a half years spent writing and recording
Corporate America, Scholz estimates that about a year of
that time was devoted to the title track, as he wrote and re-wrote
lyrics, and tinkered with melodies and arrangements, determined to
craft a song worthy of the cause.
“The list of atrocities committed by big business is endless,”
he says. “Some people automatically think the song was written
about Enron, but the lyrics to that song were completed prior to
any of those scandals. What this song is written about is far more
serious than executives ripping off employees, even though some of
those cases people lost their life savings. But big business has
taken lives from people. They’ve killed people left and right.
There’s all kinds of examples, things like toxic waste causing
birth defects, global warming. These people seem to have an endless
variety of nasty things they can come up with.”
The long time between albums gave Scholz a time to digest the
changes in music and let the nuances of what he heard seep into his
songwriting. “I don’t buy CDs,” he says. “I don’t listen to the
radio when I’m driving in the car. I hear it when I shoot pool, I
hear it playing basketball, I hear it if I’m at somebody else’s
house. There’s a whole lot of different sources. I’ve heard an
awful lot of music I like. What I’m most impressed with in music in
the last ten years is there’s more emotion in the vocals and more
emotion in the arrangements and there’s much more experimentation and diversity. I tried to take advantage of that.”