A few weeks ago, when Andrea was subjected to me taking a YouTube cruise down some of my favorite music videos from the '80s, "In the Air Tonight" came on. Eventually, the part plays. As Andrea looks up, she sees Collins seated and banging out the riff and she remarks, "Hmph. I know everybody makes a big deal about that section, but I didn't realize it was Phil Collins on drums."
"Wait. What?!" My mind was blown. I had sudden flashbacks to her making a similarly inherently obvious statement about the Eagles.
Interestingly, Collins didn't set out to record one of the most epic drum fills in rock and roll. The first time he laid down the track, he said he could have gone in one of two directions and "I just happened to choose the one I did."
As I write this, we're on another road trip and another one of Collins's tunes comes to mind. Released in 1985, "Take Me Home" features a wandering Phil Collins in a number of world capitals. It also happens to be Andrea's favorite of his entire discology.
When this song was first featured in Rock-tober, I noted how it incited my own wanderlust. Ten years later I've visited 46 of 50 US states and 5 of 7 continents. I'm looking forward to completing the quest and hitting those last four (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota). A friend of ours noted that the Fargo Visitors Center will actually issue you a certificate if North Dakota is the 50th state you visit on your tour.
As for the continents, only South America and Antarctica remain. I'm thinking one of them will be markedly more difficult than the other. I'll have to ping McMurdo station to see if they need an IT guy.
As a post script I recently found out about the group, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony releasing a single, "Home", in 2003 that heavily sampled "Take Me Home". They'd asked Collins to join them in the video, but he initially refused. According to an interview with Rolling Stone,
"Bone Thugs-N-Harmony called me up and said, 'We've done a version of your song 'Take Me Home' and we'd like you to be in the video.' I said, 'No, I'm not in America.' They said, 'They can come wherever you are.' I said, 'Don't make me say, 'No, f--k off.'' But then I heard the song, and I quite liked it, and they agreed to come to Geneva. How could I disappoint these guys? They were nice lads."
When I heard the song, I liked it as well.
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