Heart – Private Audition

Minority opinion, I’m sure: I think this is the best Heart album.

This album is entirely filler-free and perfectly sequenced, with an evocative mix of rockers and ballads. I even like the dialogue and the cover. The rockers “Cities Burning” and “America” are perfect bookends to the eclectic mix of hard-driving gems and ballads in between.

I played this constantly when it came out and still play it often today. Heart was losing its audience here a few years before reinventing itself in the ‘80s, but it never lost me.

Terrible album cover, but the music is great! I have some of their classic albums, and even though it is poorly ranked, I found this album to stand out with the production and diversity.

This album was released the last week of May 1982 (Billboard Top LPs & Tape, June 12, 1982). Nothing about this album approximates the style of "psychedelic rock" or "prog rock." It's straight-ahead, guitar-driven, classic album rock no different than Little Queen or Dog & Butterfly. If anything, the radio single "This Man Is Mine" is a 50's-style throwback. On whole the album is probably best considered the end of the 70's era Heart, before they gave in to radio-friendly pop ditties and rococo stylings. It stiffed on the charts, which is too bad - I won't say it's as good as their 70s-heyday, but "City's Burning" is as "Barracuda" as one expects Heart to be. Not necessarily underrated, but deserved a bigger audience than it got.