“Far From Over” (Frank Stallone) vs “All I’m Think’ About” (Bruce Springsteen)
Prime vs Past Prime
Frank Stallone is famously the brother of Sylvester Stallone -- or infamously so if you were hoping for more Bee Gees music in Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever. Sylvester Stallone had already included his little brother on the soundtracks to Rocky, Rocky II, and Paradise Alley when he took the director’s chair for Staying Alive. The Bee Gees wrote six new songs for the 1983 film, but the elder Stallone made “Far From Over” and two other Frank-fronted songs much more prominent in the movie, despite the fact that the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack is one of best selling albums in history. At least Frank got a top-10 single out of the deal.
Bruce Springsteen’s 2005 Devils & Dust was his 13th studio album and the third to be mainly acoustic. The record is not as immediately thematic or somber as Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad; it’s a collection of various songs Springsteen recorded in his home studios over the years 1996-2004. These songs benefit from a more intimate, homespun approach than would be available from the E Street Band, who had grown large enough to populate a city block. As is often the case when all the Grammy voters know your name, the album received five nominations, and Springsteen won Best Solo Rock Vocal, his third win in the category.
Instant Listenability
“Far From Over” is “Eye of the Tiger” for jazz hands. As a song designed as training montage fodder, its appeal could not be more instantaneous. Every instrument in the band hits the opening notes hard -- BAM! Ba-BAM! -- before the sound drops out for a one-note piano solo pounded out in the rhythm of a teen losing at Space Invaders. What follows is a less subdued version of John Tech’s “Roundball Rock” theme for the NBA on NBC. Frank Stallone has some underdog appeal as he strains to be heard over production that, as it starts to become too much, adds more. Driving rock guitar, shrieking strings, shrieking backup singers, a shrieking, out-of-nowhere guitar solo, out-of-nowhere horn stabs, an absolutely wild spiraling synth solo -- you feel the rush of suddenly ingesting every early-‘80s pop cliche and then rubbing what’s left on your gums.
“All I’m Thinkin’ About” sounds pretty great, at first. There’s a timeless appeal to close mics on an acoustic guitar, where you hear not just the notes, but the hands playing them. The scratching of brushes on a snare carries the beat and sets up some truly tasty slide work on a resonator guitar. That apostrophe in place of the dropped “g” in the title is a dead giveaway that we’re in for some folksy-ass shit, so the sound feels appropriately warm and homey for a simple song that could score a scene where two old-timers play checkers on an overturned barrel. Then Springsteen starts singing through his nose. It’s not so much that you miss his usual underbite rasp but that his Southern Gothic falsetto makes the pushes the (probable) sexual innuendo in the downhome imagery to the wrong side of creepy.
Winner: Frank Stallone.
Lifetime Listenability
“Far From Over” isn’t meant for a lifetime. It’s meant for four minutes of oiled muscles or at most a long evening that ends at dawn with two people who just met agreeing to open a restaurant. It certainly gets you amped up, but the come down is fierce. After three listens, my Spotify desktop app shutdown and wouldn’t restart without a reboot. This song is a lot.
“All I’m Thinkin’ About” might just be a solid little tune stuffed with Down South cliches that put a different spin on the trope of love songs from the perspective of some who’s fucked it all up. It sounds great, and its 4:17 goes by quick and easy. Or, you could go spelunking through the lyrics for euphemisms and innuendo, which makes for hours of fun if that’s what you’re into. “Blind man waving by the side of the road,” for example -- is that alfresco masturbation? Just the idea that an aging horndog would go this hard is a lot.
Winner: draw
The Verdict
“Far From Over” is so ridiculous, it’s kind of fun. You won’t be mad if your spin class instructor drops the needle during a HIIT workout. Also, if you think of “Far From Over” outside of the context of Staying Alive… Nevermind. You can’t. This isn’t just a case of a song becoming so closely associated with a film that you can’t separate the music from the images. Even if you haven’t seen the Stallone-directed Saturday Night Fever sequel that has next to nothing to do with the prior film, you can absolutely feel how this song embodies a movie where the hero moment comes from nearly naked John Travolta pushing a General Hospital actress across the stage so that he can dance an improvised solo in a modern dance Broadway show called Satan’s Alley. Listen to this writhing hunk of kitsch a few times on whatever streaming service is up to the task, and you’ll want a shower.
Wanting to hit the showers because you’re sweaty is better than because you feel unclean, however. Springsteen’s song sounds like it was recorded in a living room in the best way, and he’s such a solid songwriter than even a relative clunker like “All I’m Thinkin’ About” is, as a tune, not at all bad. His falsetto, on the other hand, is. Even a charitable assessment of the lyrics’ pastoral imagery would find them a bit leering. His high-pitched faux-innocent vocals make that questionable nature of words like “your sweet brown legs got me feeling so blue” feel like a question best left unanswered.
Winner: Frank Stallone
About the author
Scott Frampton is a Knicks fan, wine lover, husband and father, who has written about music for Esquire, CMJ and many other publications. He may have invented “RIYL” (Recommended iI You Like) for album reviews and can be found via his excellent Substack, The Best Song Ever (This Week).