By the time Huey Lewis and the News began working on their fourth studio album, 1986’s Fore!, the group had seen their third album, 1983’s Sports, top the U.S. Billboard 200 chart and earn them four U.S. Top 10 singles with Heart and Soul, I Want a New Drug, The Heart of Rock & Roll and If This is It.
On top of that, their single The Power of Love – the theme to 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future – gave the group their first U.S. Number 1. In the wake of that success, they were now under enormous pressure to deliver more hits.
“Though we were busy touring after Sports came out, we were always writing a little bit here and there,” says former News guitarist Chris Hayes.
“We realized we were going to have to make another record, so we started writing in earnest. At one point we had around eight songs. Bob Brown, who was our manager, came to me and said, ‘Hayes, I need you to write another hit!’ And it’s not like I could actually just do it whenever.”
Hayes – co-writer of The Power of Love, I Want a New Drug and many others – went home and continued writing. Inspiration soon hit after listening to jazz records and Donald Fagen’s 1982 album, Nightfly.
“I loved that record, particularly I.G.Y., and it inspired me to come up with Stuck with You,” Hayes says.
“I wanted to write something with that sort of groove. Stuck with You is pretty poppy – kind of a sappy song. I wrote the music, then Huey wrote the lyrics. Some of the guys made fun of it, but it ended up giving us our second Number 1.”
Fore! would take six months to record, with session dates fitting around the group’s hectic touring schedule. “We were in and out, because we’d do a batch of songs and then have to go and do some shows and then come back and get back into it,” Hayes says. “It took us quite a while, but we got it done.”
When it came to the guitar tones on the album, Hayes adhered to a streamlined setup. “I used a 1985 Gibson Spirit II prototype for the leads through a 50-watt Marshall combo with a 12-inch speaker, and I used that with a 4x12 cabinet,” he says.
“I just cranked that up all the way and it sounded pretty good. For the rhythm stuff, I used a Fender Strat through a ’60s Fender black-panel Deluxe.
“I’d record all the stuff pretty dry and then monitor it with some effects on, just so that it would sound good while I was playing it. But all the signals went dry to tape, and then effects like reverb and delays got added post.”
Looking back on the album, Hayes affirms it’s his favorite LP in the Huey Lewis and the News oeuvre.
“It was the last record we made that was still more kind of rock-oriented,” he says. “There were some great guitar songs on that one. But as we did the fifth record and then the sixth, radio stations were kind of moving away from guitar-oriented music. All these metal guys were doing acoustic versions of their songs, so electric guitars were kind of going out of favor.”
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