North Coast is an album by the Cleveland based Michael Stanley Band which was released in 1981. It reached No. 79 on the Billboard charts and included the hit Falling in Love Again which reached No. 64 on the Billboard hot singles list. It was the second album for the group on EMI America. The album's title refers to Cleveland, America's "North Coast".
Album origin
Following the success of Heartland, the band gathered at the Suma Recording studios in Cleveland, Ohio to record another collection of "solid rock" tunes, as Stanley always put it. The album was produced by Eddie Kramer, who worked with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, KISS, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and was mixed at the Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York City. It has been said by reviewers and Stanley himself that the album best approximates how the band sounds when it is performing in concert. There is truth to this assessment, even though the songs were new for the band at the time, they play them with gusto and bravado. Several songs became standards in their sold out concerts for years to come. Ever present is a great wall of sound as defined by legendary music producer Phil Spector. There are not only the customary MSB sax licks, bass thumps, and guitar solos, but amble keyboard, drums, and other unique sounds that are not quite identifiable but do add to the color of the notes.
The songs
The album kicks off with the self-effacing Northeast Ohio saturated In the Heartland which talks about the typical life of a midwesterner in America and how everything that really matters takes place in the Heartland. This was also a nod to the album which launched the roller coaster adventure that the band would ride for the next three years, the seminal MSB EMI offering, Heartland. The next two numbers group keyboardist and song writing machine Kevin Raleigh's When Your Heart Says It's Right and Stanley/Pelander's Somewhere in the Night, along with Stanley's Heaven and Hell all of which became standard favorites at the band's epic live performances to sold out crowds in the midwest states. One of the most ambitious tracks on the record was the seemingly New Wave sounding Chemistry which talks about the importance or perhaps the mistake of having too much chemistry. It could be construed that Stanley and company are not talking about the goodness of chemistry but rather the erroneous conclusion that chemistry is always a great path to advancement be it in love, biology, or industry. The ambiguity of the track makes it all the more intriguing. The only hit was "Falling in Love Again" written by Michael Stanley and keyboardist Bob Pelander. It reached No. 64 on the Billboard magazine charts. The B-side was "Does It Hurt".
