Great Music: Boston - Hitch a Ride

Everybody likes music right? Well, I do too! So I'm gonna spend some time talking about songs I think are Really Good. Good? Good.

In the mid 70s, guitarist and mechanical engineer Tom Scholz began developing an album in his home recording studio. He had songs, he had original guitar tones, and he had instrumentation - what he needed were vocals. To do the job, he turned to his friend Brad Delp, a singer with an outstanding vocal range that fit Scholz's sound perfectly. Slowly, the project grew, and in 1976, the 8 finished songs were released as a record. Under the band name Boston, Scholz and Delp ended up creating the best-selling debut album (at the time) in the United States. Not bad for a project that was thrown together pretty crudely.

Boston was certainly a one-of-a-kind band; after all, they weren't really a band at all, they were just a couple of guys Scholz brought together to work on some songs. It wasn't until the album was released that they got together and started touring; perhaps this is why Boston's lineup changed over and over again as they went on. However, Scholz and Delp always remained - that is, until 2007, when Delp tragically committed suicide. According to pretty much all accounts, Delp was an incredible guy - clearly, however, he was troubled.

So, with this context, I can talk about Hitch A Ride. This isn't a very well-known Boston song - it was on side 2, away from the hits like More Than A Feeling and Foreplay/Longtime.  To be honest, though, there isn't a single bad song on the album - I just think Hitch a Ride is especially notable. Musically the song is more than solid - an infectious guitar riff in the verses, an insane keyboard solo, an incredibly chill chorus, and what I think is probably the best guitar solo outro I have ever heard. Best way to describe it is a kind of catharsis, I guess.

Why does Freud always look furious in pictures? I wouldn't want him as a therapist.

Lyrically the song seems to be about moving on, getting away from a bad environment, or maybe even death. The latter becomes especially profound after you've heard about Delp's death; it makes the song almost sound like foreshadowing for what was to come. At the same time, though, it doesn't seem Delp had any hand in writing Hitch a Ride, so I'm probably just making up a bunch of nonsense. But uh, that's what I do. Deal with it.

So there's not much more to say here - Hitch a Ride is just a really great song! I'd have to recommend the whole album, though - like I said, not a single bad song on it. It's probably the best example of hard, distortion-based rock music done incredibly right (whereas something like, say... Bon Jovi is done horribly, horribly wrong... but that's a rant for another day).

Do I need any more proof that the 80s was the worst decade than this picture of Bon Jovi? Yeah, I didn't think so.