Rockford (2006)
1.Welcome to the World
2.Perfect Stranger
3.If It Takes A Lifetime
4.Come On Come On Come On
5.O Claire
6.This Time You Got It
7.Give it Away
8.One More
9.Every Night and Every Day
10.Dream the Night Away
11.All Those Years Away
12.Decaf
At long last, Cheap Trick remembered who they were.
For decades, the band that once threatened to detonate the entire landscape of American power pop spent their time engaged in artistic contortions: chasing commercial trends in the '80s, rediscovering themselves (repeatedly) in the '90s, and generally appearing as if they were always trying to be something—just not themselves. Then came Rockford.
The title itself, a nod to their hometown roots, seemed an apt metaphor. This was not reinvention. This was reclamation. For the first time in years, the band dropped the pretenses and simply played like they meant it.
The results? A rollicking, unfussy, and gloriously unified collection of songs that doesn't so much diversify as it refines. It is an album less concerned with variety and more with consistency—cut from the same bolt of high-energy, melodic cloth that once gave us Dream Police and Surrender. The brilliance here is not in wild experimentation, but in trust: trust in the material, trust in each other, and trust in their legacy.
The opening track, Welcome to the World, might jolt longtime fans with its camp, sounding at times like The Brady Bunch on amphetamines, but from there the album rights itself quickly and firmly. The closer, Decaf, is a clever musical pun—literally spelling out the titular word in its chord structure—but the joke, while smart, overstays its welcome. Luckily, these are bookends to a centerpiece that needs no gimmicks.
O Claire, not to be confused with the similarly named tease from Heaven Tonight, is a revelation. A heart-wrenching Lennon-esque lament, it's among the most emotionally honest moments in the band's catalogue—a paean to lost love that eschews sentimentality for rawness. If that doesn’t stop you mid-sentence, One More just might. A tough, razor-edged rocker about the corrosive pull of addiction—not necessarily to narcotics, but to anything—it hits with the precision of a band who’s lived every line.
The remaining tracks blur pleasingly into one another—not through lack of creativity, but because they are united in tone, tempo, and intent. This is the sound of a group who no longer feel the need to impress by acrobatics; they simply let the songs do the talking. There are no bloated epics here, no ballads engineered for the charts. Just music. Loud, proud, and entirely theirs.
With Rockford, Cheap Trick finally stopped chasing shadows and caught up with themselves. And it suits them.
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