Loggins and Love
Kenny Loggins & Glendale POPS perform ‘This is Romance’
By Carl Kozlowski 02/09/2012
Most pop music stars seem to have a few years of success before they fade out of popularity and into obscurity. But Kenny Loggins is one of the fortunate ones. He has managed to reinvent himself and remain consistently popular through several career phases: introspective singer-songwriter in the 1970s, “king of the movie soundtracks” in the 1980s and purveyor of “parent pop” in the 1990s and beyond.
On Friday, he’ll be performing with the Glendale Pops for its special “This is Romance” show, rejoining the popular ensemble after a successful show last spring. Audiences can expect him to perform most of his timeless hits — including “Footloose,” “Celebrate Me Home” and “This Is It” — during an 80-minute set that will be augmented by a short set from the orchestra itself.
“I don’t play with orchestras that often, maybe a few times a year, and I let the orchestras’ arrangers usually handle the stylistic changes,” says Loggins, speaking by phone from San Francisco. “But it’s always fun and interesting to let people hear their favorite songs in a whole new light.”
Though he was born near Seattle, Loggins spent his teen years in Alhambra and graduated from San Gabriel Mission High School in 1966. After a few years building a successful reputation as a songwriter, he teamed up with star singer-producer Jim Messina to form the wildly popular duo Loggins & Messina.
However, by 1978, Loggins felt ready to move on his own into a solo career. He wrote and recorded two Grammy-winning classics, “What a Fool Believes” and “This Is It,” with Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, and had three hit albums by the time he broke into the world of making hit songs for movies with “I’m Alright” in 1980’s “Caddyshack.”
By the end of the decade, Loggins had a massive No. 1 record with the title tune from “Footloose” but also scored big with “Danger Zone” and “Playing With the Boys” on the “Top Gun” soundtrack before moving onto another Top 10 movie ballad, “Meet Me Halfway” from the 1987 Sylvester Stallone debacle “Over the Top.” Ironically, he wasn’t ever supposed to record his signature hit “Danger Zone” in the first place.
“With movie songs, the emotion gets delivered to you, whether you write a song like ‘Footloose’ [with Dean Pitchford, the film’s screenwriter] based solely on the screenplay, or a song like “Playing with the Boys” based on watching footage from the film,” says Loggins. “Sometimes there were big cattle calls looking for the singers. I wasn’t supposed to sing ‘Danger Zone,’ I was one of several groups up for it, and I thought it was supposed to be Toto at one point. They couldn’t decide who they wanted to sing it, so I stepped in and did it. I was in studio, working on ‘Playing,’ and Moroder called me in and said can you step in and sing. I asked if it was uptempo, because I’d been writing lots of ballads at that time. He said yeah, so I did it next day, after never having heard it before.”
Kenny Loggins performs with the Glendale Pops in “This is Romance” at 8 p.m. Friday at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Tickets are $26 to $80. Call (818) 243-ALEX or visit alextheatre.org.
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