475. Cinderella / Heartbreak Station. 1990. 1.5/5

When Cinderella made their commercial break through on the back of their debut album “Night Songs”, it was in the time where glam metal was making huge waves in the US market, and beginning to make a go of it in other places around the world as well. Their style that mixes tones of Def Leppard and AC/DC, in their music as well as the vocals of band leader Tom Keifer, found an audience ready to party along with them. It reached #3 on the US album charts, signifying exactly where popular music was headed at the time. When it came to producing their sophomore album, Keifer and his bandmates chose to move away from the direction that bands such as Bon Jovi and Poison continued to pursue. “Long Cold Winter” toned away from the glam metal sound and began introducing more of Keifer’s preference to blues music as the basis of their songs. The overall configuration of the music still weighed heavily in glam metal’s favour but the slight directional change was prevalent. On the back of this album, the band took on a tour that performed 254 gigs in a 14 month period to promote the album. This included being involved in August 1989 with the Moscow Music Peace Festival, playing alongside other metal acts, such as Ozzy Osbourne, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and Skid Row. When it came to promoting the band to the biggest audience, this was one of the best ways to do it.
Cinderella now looked to be on the cusp of a major worldwide breakthrough, something that would eventually rest upon the success of their follow up third studio album. Coming at a time when the music world felt as though it too was on the edge of a major moving point, where the style of music being written and performed was about to make a leap of faith in one direction (but then pivoted completely within 12 months of this album being released), the content of this album could possibly decide just how well Cinderella could maintain their own destiny. And that came to pass with the writing, recording and release of the band’s third album which in some ways caught the music world by surprise, with the arrival of “Heartbreak Station”.

The difficulty that comes in reviewing this album is a fairly obvious one for anyone who had listened to Cinderella’s previous two albums prior to this being released. And it is an easy thing for anyone to say who is a huge supporter of the band that this album is a natural progression of the music that Tom Keifer and his bandmates were working towards, which is why it has the style that it does. Because - quite obviously and quite significantly - this is not the kind of album you would expect from the band Cinderella if you had seen or listened to them on their journey over the previous four years.
There are several quotes attributed to Keifer about this album on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the album, and many others in area of the internet if you are willing to do a search. In all of them, he speaks of his disillusionment with the polished rock sound that glam metal had been producing, and that existed on the band’s first two albums, and that when speaking to the mixing engineer for this album, he said to give the songs a rawer feel because, and I quote: "everybody was caught up in that whole '80s' sound. I told him it was time to do something different”. In 2017, in an interview on radio, Keifer was quoted, "I think Heartbreak Station is my favourite because I just love how dry and how raw that record is. And we evolved into that sound, whereas the first two records were a little more 'flavour of the day' in the processing – you know, things were a little slicker and kind of processed in the '80s – and we evolved into this more organic, kind of dry, raw, real sound on Heartbreak Station”.
Nobody could forgive Keifer for going in whatever direction he felt that he wanted or needed to go in. As the main songwriter, it is his prerogative to write and perform the kind of music that he wants to. And the fact that the band’s first two albums were so successful that he could basically do whatever he wanted because, firstly, he had earned the right to; and secondly, must have felt comfortable enough in himself to push for that change, is well within his purview.
But... as a fan of the band, or as a fan of at least one of their previous albums... how are you supposed to process this album in comparison to those other two? The increased introduction of the steel pedal guitar, the slide guitar, the mandolin, the acoustic guitar varieties, the saxophone, the clavinet, piano, organ... all of that is a difficult thing to get your head around. The resulting move towards a heavier blues sound, the country twang that comes as a further result of this, the slower tempo of tracks... all of this is a lot to process if you are a fan coming into the band’s third album. And it is true that other bands were making processed changes to their style at the same time, as a precursor to what happened to music as a whole within the next 12 months. Iron Maiden had stripped back their sound for their “No Prayer for the Dying” album. Gary Moore had completely reinvented himself as a blues guitarist rather than a hard rock guitarist for “Still Got the Blues”. But Maiden still sounded like Maiden, and Gary Moore had publicised well before the event that he was going to do a ‘one-off’ blues album. (That turned into 15 years of it, but that’s another story). This is what Tom Keifer is suggesting is just the natural progression from the previous album, but which is far more than that. What about if you didn’t mind the greasy bluesy touches to Cinderella’s glam metal sound on” Night Songs", but didn't want the full blown blues rock sound that came with “Heartbreak Station”? Well, to his credit (or not), Tom Keifer didn’t care. This was the album he wrote and that Cinderella recorded, and you bought it at your peril. But if you weren’t aware of the sonic change to the music of the band, buying it may have meant you had wasted your money.
If you look at this album purely from the point of view of someone who loves and appreciates blues rock, then there is little doubt the band has produced an album that covers all of the basics in the best way possible. There are faster paced, uptempo vibed tracks such as the opening of “The More Things Change” and “Love’s Got Me Doin’ Time”. “Shelter Me” was the lead single from the album that is somehow classed as a glam metal song but is drenched in saxophone and keyboards and pianos, such that blues is all you hear. The ballad track is the self-titled “Heartbreak Station”, with as much country as blues, the acoustic guitar and steel driven alternative, all pulling together to with the keys and synth to yank every single drip of ballad quality from the song. The remainder of the album produces more of the same, the same mix of blues rock and acoustic ballads. And the album will have been approved by many fans. It went #19 on the US charts, but it did fall off very quickly. And just how many of those people who bought the album did so thinking it would be more of the glam metal they had enjoyed before, only to find that it didn’t suit their music tastes at all due to the huge changes in style? You would think – a bloody lot of them.

Though I was never a huge Cinderella fan, just one who enjoyed the two albums they had released without them ever becoming a band that I was listening to on a regular basis, this album surprised me with what seems to be a huge change in direction musically. Honestly, when you first put on the album, and “The More Things Change” starts, you would dead set start looking at the CD cover to see why you had put on a rockabilly country album. I know I did back when I first heard this album.
On reflection, I can see and hear now the progression that results in “Heartbreak Station” more than I could back on the album’s release. At the time I was of the opinion that here was a hair metal band that wanted to be a country and western band! An interesting career choice, I thought at the time. Send in the steel guitars, bring in the piano. It’s all here, and it’s all a bit of a change. But the tendency towards this had been slightly more noticeable on “Long Cold Winter”, it's just that I didn’t really hear it at the time. And like I’ve said, I wasn’t a huge Cinderella fan, they weren’t taking up hours of my listening time each and every week, they were just coming on for a spin to break up the thrash and heavy that was surrounding me.
By now you will already have discerned exactly what I felt about this album back in 1990 and 1991. In a similar way that I had been knocked off centre by Gary Moore’s “Still Got the Blues” album earlier in the year, “Heartbreak Station” threw a bigger curveball. At least I had been prepared for Gary’s turn to the blues side. I hadn’t been prepared for it with Cinderella. So the album quickly fell out of my listening circle, and moved to a quiet section of my collection.
How often has it come out over the next 30-odd years? Not a lot I can tell you that. With so much music in the world available to listen to, there has to be a reason to fall back to an album that you are far less engaged with. It has had the occasional listen, mostly during times when I have worked through artists and their catalogue, but never because I’ve thought “wow, I can’t believe I have listened to this album for so long. I really should do that now!” So it would be fair and accurate to say that over the last week, I have listened to this album more than I have at any time since I first got the album and was listening to it then. And I am older now, and not so self obsessed with particular bands and albums that I can’t listen to an album like “Heartbreak Station” and appreciate it for what it is and enjoy it. And that is the reflection I have gained from the past week or so. I haven’t minded listening to this album at all. I can take all the vagaries that it throws at me, and just listen and tap along. This is never going to rise to the ranks of one the best albums I own, but I have been able to listen to it over the last week without completely disregarding it as I did back when it was released. It was still for me a strange direction for the band to take, but given that it was a brave one in the environment the band was in, and the massive popularity that they had achieved in such a short space of time, you can only but admire that. This album is not for everyone, and in reality continues to not be for me either, but at least I know that now, if I ever come across someone who actually owns this album, actually listens to this album, and wants to put it on and play it in my presence, that I won’t be completely and totally against hearing it again.