Deep Cuts

Music writing for the long play

  1. One and Done

    Signal Lost: The One-Album Career of an AOR Band That Arrived Two Years Too Late

    In April 1989, four working Los Angeles musicians finished recording one of the most accomplished AOR albums of the decade at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Their producer believed it was the best work he had ever done. Their label dropped them within months of its release. The lead vocalist — already established through King Kobra, soon to be established through Unruly Child — would later transition and lose access to the music industry that had built her career. A retrospective on Signal's Loud and Clear, the album that should have sold millions, and on Marcie Michelle Free, the singer who carried its eight months of work into the rest of her life until her death in October 2025.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 14 min read

  2. Long Plays

    Commercial Suicide: Def Leppard, Slang, and the Album That Refused to Be Hysteria

    In May 1996, the band that had built one of the most commercially perfect rock albums of the 1980s deliberately stopped making music that sounded like that album. They wrote in a Spanish house. They produced themselves without Mutt Lange for the first time in sixteen years. They cited Soundgarden's Superunknown as inspiration. They jokingly called the album Commercial Suicide while they were making it. They were not, in retrospect, joking. A long play on the album that broke Def Leppard's platinum streak and which the band continues to defend as one of the most important records they ever made.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 14 min read

  3. Retrospective

    The Band She Built: Vixen, Jan Kuehnemund, and the Limits of the Female Bon Jovi

    She started the band in 1973 in a Saint Paul high school. She moved it to Los Angeles in 1981. She fought for it across four decades, through three substantially different lineups and one lawsuit she filed to keep the name. She died of cancer in 2013. The body of work she built — two commercial peaks separated by years of structural difficulty — represents one of the more under-credited careers in late hair metal. A retrospective on Vixen, the band that almost everyone called the female Bon Jovi, and on the guitarist whose forty-year creative project the band actually was.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 14 min read

  4. Retrospective

    Don't Know What You Got: Cinderella and the Voice That Disappeared Overnight

    In four years, they made three records that travel further than almost any of their commercial peers managed in entire careers — from teased-hair glam metal to dustbowl blues-rock, with one of the genre's strongest songwriters at the center of the journey. Then his voice stopped working, and the journey ended. A featured retrospective on the Philadelphia band whose creative trajectory was one of the cleanest of the era and whose ending was one of its quietest tragedies.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 20 min read

  5. One and Done

    The Singer the Label Wanted: Femme Fatale and the One Album That Wasn't Supposed to Be the Only One

    MCA Records signed them. MTV played them. Cheap Trick took them on tour. Their manager developed brain cancer mid-promotion and the label decided they'd rather keep the singer than the band. A look at Femme Fatale's 1988 debut — the album that should have been the start of a career and instead became the entirety of one — and at the singer who has spent thirty-six years building a different kind of music life around the eighteen months when the major-label commercial infrastructure briefly noticed her.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 14 min read

  6. One and Done

    After the Hit: Tuff, Stevie Rachelle, and the Singer Who Became the Historian

    In 1991, a Phoenix-by-way-of-Hollywood glam band had a power ballad that reached number three on Dial MTV, landing between Metallica and Guns N' Roses. Within eighteen months, Atlantic had dropped them, and the genre that defined their commercial existence was effectively over. The lead singer spent the next twenty-eight years doing something stranger and more lasting than the band's brief commercial moment: he became, from the inside, the single most consistent chronicler of the scene he had briefly belonged to. The first installment of One and Done.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 15 min read

  7. Retrospective

    Two Eclipses: Hardline and the Album That Couldn't Be Followed

    In April 1992, a Journey guitarist, two members of Bad English, and two brothers from Brooklyn released an arena-ready hard rock album into a marketplace that no longer existed. Ten years later, a different configuration of mostly the same band released the follow-up. Almost nobody heard either one. A look at Double Eclipse and II — the two albums that bracketed Hardline's actual commercial life, and the gap between them that made the second album the strange artifact it became.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 03 · · 16 min read

  8. Retrospective

    Cut from the Same Cloth: Rough Cutt and the Bands That Outgrew Them

    Mentored by Dio, managed by his wife, signed to Warner Bros., opening arenas for the biggest metal acts in America. Rough Cutt had every advantage a 1980s Los Angeles hard rock band could have, and almost none of the success. By the time the band dissolved in 1987, the catalog of musicians who had passed through their ranks read like a list of who actually made it in mid-1980s metal. A retrospective on a band whose history is mostly the history of the bands that emerged from it.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 02 · · 14 min read