Stepping out from behind an impressive career as an in-demand studio vocalist, and also stepping out from behind the shadow of his former band, Survivor, Dave Bickler has decided that 2019 was the right time to release what is his first ever solo album – Darklight.
It is a compositional tour de force, with 11 tracks encompassing the best of the melodic rock that was his stock in trade in the 1980s, but melded together with a little grit and grunge, all wrapped up in a modern recording that highlights Bickler’s vocal prowess, lyrical mastery and knack for melody.
Bickler’s career goes back more than 45 years to when he began in the midwestern US band Jamestown Massacre. By the mid-1970s, while working singing jingles and other advertising and promotional purposes, he had met up with songwriter Jim Peterik and the pair became friends and collaborators, eventually forming the band Survivor.
He played on the band’s first four albums, including the massively successful third record, Eye of the Tiger, the Grammy-winning title track serving as the theme song for the huge Sylvester Stallone movie hit Rocky III. He would leave the band in 1983 because of a major health issue (polyps on his vocal chords) but did a seven-year return stint from 1993 to 2000 and was back again from 2013 to 2016. In the interim, he returned to the commercial jingle world and performing with other bands in the Chicago area.
The idea for finally doing a solo album began stirring in the back of Bickler’s mind not long after moving to New York City in the early 2000s and picked up steam in 2010 when he began writing in earnest. The return to Survivor put the project on hold, but after 2016, he jumped back into the writing and recording process with both feet, assembling a killer band to play alongside him on the record. That band included drummer Ryan Hoyle (Collective Soul, Paul Rodgers) Blind Melon bassist Brad Smith and guitarist/producer Stephen DeAcutis (Corey Glover, Appice Brothers).
“I realized through this media process that the best answer to the obvious question is that I decided to release the album because it was finally done. It took some doing too. I tried to get labels interested back in the day and they were always saying, ‘we’re looking for somebody like U2’ and all that kind of stuff. And now because of technology and the internet, of course anybody can put an album out. You can self release if you want to. A lot of those things don’t exist any more that were part of the regular record company structure. So, there’s more freedom. Looking back, I guess they didn’t understand what I was doing I guess, or the music I wanted to make,” he said, adding that it shouldn’t have surprised them that he wanted to make the kind of rich, lush melodic rock that made Survivor a success.
“I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan when I was 11, and that’s why I wanted to be in a band. It was the coolest thing ever to see The Beatles. And then by the time of the late 1980s, it seemed like things were getting a little more to where it was more about being a rock star than about the music. But in the 1990s bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam came along, and I really liked those bands. I thought they were very refreshing, and they had an influence on me as well.
“I don’t take anything for granted in life, because I know how hard it is in the music business. I feel very fortunate to still be doing this and that people will give it a listen. What I love to do more than anything is create music.”
And Bickler said there was no question that he would be releasing a full album and not a bunch of singles or EPs.
“I like having a collection of songs that you can really sink your teeth into. Again, some people put way too many songs on records. In the heyday of the CDs, they may have 15 or 16 songs. I don’t know how you can listen to that many songs in one sitting. For me, less is more. But I like the concept of long-playing albums. It was a real innovation back in the later 1950s to have that long-playing record, with kind of a theme to each one, which is something that rock and roll really pioneered,” he said.
“It’s a snapshot in time and gives you a sense of the headspace that the artist was in when he was making the album. Songs are amazing things; they have to be really compact with the words, because you can only have so many words to get in there, and then you have the music to support those words, which gives it emotional context, something that reaches people and makes them feel something.
“When I start off with a cool idea, I usually get a melody in my head and words start rolling out. But to get to the finish line, and pull everything together to get to that end, and have the song be a ride that pulls the listener along, well, then it becomes a little more of an art. And I also put a lot of thought into the song order, which I believe is still important. I talked with all my collaborators and ended up with the current order, which I think worked out pretty well. As I said, you want to take people on a trip that is unlike anything they might otherwise go on.”
The first track from Darklight, and the lead-off single, is Hope, which could also be said to be Bickler’s overall take on life these days. Yes, there are dark things in the world and in people’s lives, but hope will ultimately prevail.
“We all have dark parts of ourselves, but hopefully the better angels will win out. There are both dark things and light things on this album, but ultimately, you’ve got to hold on to hope. I wrote the song after 9/11. I was living in New York City at the time and it was a horrible day, and ultimately this song is my answer to that. But I think the words have a universal message. There are other songs, like Fear of the Dark, and that’s a thought experiment about what could be going on in the mind of somebody who is going to blow themselves up and kill other people. Again, it’s a thing that is perplexing to me,” he explained.
“With Hope, it is my definite belief that there are more good people than bad people. And that there is hope for people and that helping somebody else can make you feel better than anything else, better than having fame or money or whatever. That’s kind of what it boils down to. And I also write about the beautiful things in the world, like nature and the outdoors. Sea of Green was about a real place in Colorado. When you are heading up into the mountains towards Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver, you come over the pass and when you get to a certain point there is this huge valley. And I used to like to drive up there in the springtime from Chicago and it left such an impression on me the first time I saw it and I would go back there as often as I could. There was just something special about being away from everything in amongst all these trees.
“It is a really positive experience for people to be in a beautiful place, surrounded by nature. It’s a magical place, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. I am positive there are more places that are on our Earth like that, but they are not very common. This valley is a lucky accident of nature and we shouldn’t destroy it.”
The song Time is a wistful ode to the fact that we are all growing older each and every day, and how do we cram as much living into the time that we have left.
“I feel the pressures of time, but yet I have so much left to do. How am I going to do it all? There is never enough time. And the interesting thing about the song, and something I think is pretty cools is that you can hear the gongs and chimes from a clock. Well that is a real clock, that is not a sample. The producer Steven DeAcutis had an old clock that had been in his family for more than 80 years and he got some of his high-end mics and high-end pre-amps and put them inside the thing and it turned out that the chimes were pretty in tune with the rest of the track – by accident. It was a serendipitous thing, and we all laugh about that and how lucky it was that it sounded like a gigantic church bell in a steeple, but it’s just this little antique wall clock,” said Bickler, adding that the song Lights is again a celebration of things that are far older, far more permanent and far more spectacular than our day-to-day lives.
“Its about me as a kid. My fourth grade teacher in elementary school turned my head onto science. There was this reading program where you could get all these different kinds of books, and I got ones on astronomy and stars and planets. And I remember coming to understand that the lights in the sky weren’t little twinkling points, they were stars, like big stars like the one we go around, the sun, and some of them much bigger. And that really gave me a long-lasting love of science and astronomy.”
As for the possibility of touring with the musicians who helped him on the Darklight record, Bickler is optimistic about some sort of shows down the road.
“I haven’t asked those guys, but I think it would be difficult for Ryan Hoyle and Brad Smith to be in the touring band. Brad has all kinds of stuff he is doing all the time, and Ryan is constantly working in the studio. And he already has toured for many years and really doesn’t want to be out on tour again. He did some hard miles and I think he likes working in the studio. I might be able to get them out for the odd show, like a TV appearance or something,” he said.
“Regardless of what happens on the touring front, I am proud of what we accomplished with this album. Right now, I am very happy to be a solo artist. I still think I have a lot of creativity in me and I want to keep using it. I already did some dates in Europe as part of a package with other singers, and I have a show on May 20 down in Santiago, Chile. It’s an event featuring Joe Lyn Turner [Rainbow, Deep Purple], Bobby Kimball [ex-Toto], Fran Cosmo [Boston, Orion the Hunter] and guys like that. I am actually going to play one of my original songs down there. They are letting me do that and I am really happy about that because normally at a lot of those sorts of shows they just want you to play the hits. And I realize that it’s a building process. I have to prove myself as a solo artist, and that’s not an easy thing to do, but I know in places like South America and Europe in particular, they are more open to hearing new material from classic rock artists.”
For more information on Darklight, upcoming shows and more about Dave Bickler, visit http://www.davebickler.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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