Originally Posted by
Terry
Skyscraper was certainly a more mannered type of rock than what was on EEAS, that's for sure.
Was never all that wild about JLP or Stand Up, myself. Title track was interesting as something sort of non-typical of what Roth had done up to that point.
Honestly, it has been quite a while - and I mean, probably well over a decade now - that I've actually had the hankering to listen to Skyscraper from start-to-finish. Some of that has to do with the way it sounds from a production standpoint, and it'd be reasonable to suggest Ted's absence had more than a little bit to do with that. Some of it has to do with the fact that I've always considered some of the Skyscraper material a bit weak. I mean, I wasn't particularly thrilled with, say, I'm Easy or That's Life on EEAS...but those tunes sort of made sense in terms of where they were placed on the album and had the benefit of being either surrounded or preceded by killer tunes. These days, the only tune on Skyscraper that REALLY knocks it out of the park for me is Damn Good: a lot of the other material on the album has become more timely than timeless for me as the years since the initial release date have passed by. And that probably also has something to do with Ted's absence as well, in terms of what material was chosen to be recorded.