Kenny Loggins: High Adventure : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like the Quincy Jones-produced Donna Summer, Kenny Loggins' High Adventure treats each cut as a scene in a grand, multistylistic showcase. Set pieces range from the AOR-targeted hard rock of "Don't Fight It," a duet with Journey's Steve Perry, to "It Must Be Imagination," a synthesized pop-funk minimovie whose blend of rock guitar and thick keyboard textures recalls the artier cuts on Daryl Hall and John Oates' Along the Red Ledge.

"Heartlight," a Spanish-flavored folk-pop ballad, finds Loggins joined by a children's chorus. Two Kenny Loggins-Michael McDonald collaborations, "I Gotta Try" and "Heart to Heart," are superior examples of high-tech L.A. pop-funk. And in "The More We Try," Loggins' breathy falsetto is electronically phased into a sweet, ethereal choir. Cut by cut, Loggins and producer Bruce Botnick have spared no expense in creating extravagantly opulent soundscapes.

High Adventure would still not add up to much more than a luxurious romantic diversion were it not for its Kramer vs. Kramer-like ending. "Only a Miracle," a third Loggins-McDonald collaboration, portrays fatherhood as a mystically redemptive experience on an entirely different plane. "I found the boy I was in you," Loggins sings to his son in an urgent, soul-inflected tenor, gift-wrapped in Marty Paich's stately Forties-movie-style orchestration. "Only a Miracle" gives this overdressed romance its emotional center, as well as a swooningly happy ending.