Mr. Big – “To Be With You” – (1991)

People love this song. My liking it very much depends on my mood. Sometimes I loathe it, but as I listen to it right now, it doesn’t seem so bad – maybe because I haven’t heard it in quite a while (yes, I’ve been avoiding it, but sometimes that helps you get back to be able to hear it with fresh ears). This is the song Mr. Big is known for – they were a hard rock band and their most famous song is acoustic. But it was a big hit, reaching #1 in the U.S., Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Austria and Australia. It’s the hair-band-ness of this song that makes me think it would’ve been big in the 80s – and it would have. Perhaps, most interesting (to me anyway) is the cover art of the album Lean into It. It is a photograph of the 1895 derailment of the Granville-Paris Express that overran the buffer stop and out the side of Gare Montparnasse in Paris, falling a story to street level. There was one fatality (a woman on the street killed by falling pieces of the two-foot thick wall that the train careened through). Unfortunately, Montparnasse does not look as interesting as it does in that picture. Aaand… end tangent.