Crazy Love (Poco song)
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| "Crazy Love" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Poco | ||||
| from the album Legend | ||||
| B-side | "Barbados" | |||
| Released | January 1979 | |||
| Recorded | April–August 1978 | |||
| Studio | Crystal Sound Studios (Hollywood) | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 2:55 | |||
| Label | ABC | |||
| Songwriter | Rusty Young | |||
| Producer | Richard Sanford Orshoff | |||
| Poco singles chronology | ||||
| ||||
"Crazy Love" is a 1979 hit single for the country rock group Poco introduced on the 1978 album Legend. Written by founding group member Rusty Young, "Crazy Love" was the first single by Poco to reach the Top 40 and remained the group's biggest hit, with a special impact as an Adult Contemporary hit, being ranked by Billboard as the #1 AC song for the year 1979.[3][4]
In 2012, Young would thus recall his writing "Crazy Love": "I was living in Los Angeles, working on my house one day"[5] - "I was paneling a wall and looking out over the valley in L.A. and the chorus came into my head"[6] - "I always had a guitar close at hand. It took about thirty minutes to write that song, because it was all there. It was kind of a gift."[5] Young added that the "'Ooh, ooh, Ahhhh haaa' part" of the chorus was a stopgap he intended to replace with formal lyrics but the musicians who first backed Young on the song told him: "Don't do that, that's the way it's supposed to be."[6]
In a July 17, 2011, broadcast of the Original 70s Soundtrack on urockradio.net, Young would say of his writing "Crazy Love: "for the first big hit - the only really huge hit Poco's had - [to be] a song that I wrote and sang is pretty ironic" - "When the band started all I did was [play] steel guitar and banjo and dobro and that kind of stuff: I was the instrumentalist in the band - I didn't sing and I didn't write....But I've always said that with the band what happened is that as people have left the band it's left room for others to grow. I had great teachers: Richie Furay; Neil [Young] and Stephen Stills [of Buffalo Springfield] were around in the beginning [and] I could listen to them writing songs, working on songs and how they did it. Jimmy [Messina] taught me really a lot about the whole recording process and writing poems. I just had these great teachers that I was around."
Rusty Young's background in Poco
Having played steel guitar on the track "Kind Woman" on the final Buffalo Springfield album Last Time Around (1968), Rusty Young was invited by Buffalo Springfield departing members Richie Furay and Jim Messina to join them along with George Grantham and Randy Meisner in forming Poco. After earning only three writing credits over the course of the band's first six albums, Young first raised his songwriting profile on the eighth Poco release Cantamos in 1974. By then, Poco had morphed into a four-man band consisting of founding members Rusty Young and George Grantham along with Timothy B. Schmit and Paul Cotton, who had joined the band in 1969 and 1970, respectively . The ninth Poco album release Head Over Heels (1975) marked Young's debut as a lead vocalist on the song "Us." The 1977 Poco album release Indian Summer featured Young singing lead on "Downfall." Other than instrumentals, his previous compositions for Poco prior to Legend featured Schmit as lead vocalist; on the 1976 Young composition "Rose of Cimarron", Schmit sang co-lead with Cotton.
