RICHARD PAGE

Thirty-five years ago, around this time, Broken Wings was #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Seems like another lifetime now, but for those of you who have remained fans of our music, we thought this would be a good time to let you know about something we’ve been working on. My apologies to all who are interested in both Mr. Mister and my solo career for not being more of a social media guy. I just haven’t found the inspiration to share much of my life across the cyber universe like others do. But today is a new day and lo and behold, I have something to share. Not long ago, as I was looking through old emails with the intention of deleting many of them, I came across something from Pat Mastelotto with the title, “Lost Songs.” As I remember, we had considered resurrecting some of the discarded songs from the album PULL with the intention of either adding them to the album before its much overdue release or releasing them as a new EP on its own, knowing that our most loyal fans would love it. As it turned out, there were quite a few “Lost Songs.” Some of them were structurally developed to a point; others were just bad; still, others were pretty good but missing something: a lyric that needed reworking or re-imagining completely, a melody that didn’t deliver, or other issues that made us abandon them back in 1989 when we were choosing which songs would appear on PULL. Of that group of songs, three stuck out to us as being the best of the lot. So we decided to find the master recordings of the three songs, transfer them to digital, and start working on them again. But when we tried to get the original two-inch tapes—yes, we were still using magnetic tape then—from Sony, we realized that the process we would have to go through to do that would be way too daunting to take on. For those of you who don’t know, two-inch tape breaks down (degrades) over time. So many years had passed since we’d made these recordings, and the tapes were old and fragile. In order to preserve the quality of the recordings, the tapes would have to be ‘baked,’—literally baked in a convection oven at 150 degrees for three to eight hours—then cooled to the temperature of the control room environment before the music could be transferred to digital. Since we don’t technically own the master tapes (Sony does), and therefore don’t have access to them, Sony offered to send them out to have this process done. But when we realized how much it would cost us, the idea ended there. But not quite. Undeterred, we dug deeper and discovered that three of the songs had already been transferred to digital, even though none of us could remember when or why. And then this: call it kismet, synchronicity, or luck of the draw, we discovered that the three songs already in digital form just happened to be the three we all thought were the best.

For additional information, visit: https://richardpagemusic.com