“I Still Believe in You”
The Desert Rose Band
Written by Steve Hill and Chris Hillman
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
March 4, 1989
The final No. 1 single from the Desert Rose Band captures their significance and their limitations.
You can hear in the production how the groundwork for nineties country was being laid down. Steel guitar on a late-Cetera era Chicago track was a country ballad formula about to make a whole ton of money for Music Row.
What’s missing here is the vitality and urgency in the vocal. It’s a little too “Peaceful Easy Feeling” to sustain them in an era where groups led by Marty Roe, Raul Malo, and Doug Phelps would dominate the vocal group races for most of the decade. Desert Rose Band’s “I Still Believe in You” captures an important bridge in the genre’s history, and by the end of the year, that bridge would be crossed.
The band continued to score top ten hits through 1990. A few lineup changes and three more albums followed, before the band officially disbanded in 1994.
“I Still Believe in You” gets a B.
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This is a fantastic song, a hybrid of California pop polish and steel guitars coming together for an all-you-can-eat buffet of auditory candy-coated candy. I can’t see other groups of the era making this sound as good as The Desert Rose Band, and I thought the vocals hit the sweet spot. I definitely don’t agree that an “urgency” to the vocal performance would have been a good fit for this song’s vibe. It’s unfortunate that Desert Rose’s fast ascent came to an end fairly quickly. Their follow-up single “She Don’t Love Nobody” was a firestorm of kinetic energy and my favorite of theirs. Its failure to reach the penthouse was an unfortunate tea leaf. And unfortunately, nothing from their third album was particularly memorable and they quickly slumbered into also-ran territory at what was a very poor time in country music history to have a creative slump. Luckily for me, I was able to see them in concert at my county fair in August 1989, right at the peak of their popularity. My county fair used to have the Midas touch on that, but now they tend to book artists about 40 years past the peak of their popularity.
Grade: A
I completely agree that “She Don’t Love Nobody” should have made it to the top. Very rocking song grounded in steel guitar but it’s easily my favorite single of theirs. It’s extremely hard to find for a cheap price but their last album was fantastic as well and should’ve gotten the recognition it deserved. I will say that this song is my least favorite of the singles released from the album. At least “Summer Wind” had the chorus even if I didn’t fully grasp what the song was about till later.
Just to add some historical context:
For Chris Hillman, the Desert Rose Band was very much the kind of band he wished he had had originally with The Flying Burrito Brothers twenty years before. He and long-time friend Herb Pedersen really made the band work as a late 1980’s extension of the California C&W/rock sound of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This wasn’t really the case with the Burritos because, while he did initially work well with the “genius” Gram Parsons, that great collaborative streak those two had had with the Burritos’ landmark 1969 album The Gilded Palace Of Sin soon vanished because of Parsons’ addictions to drugs, booze, and an unhealthy infatuation with the Rolling Stones.
It’s true that the Desert Rose Band, despite their #1 hits, wasn’t exactly a long-lasting entity, nor did Hillman necessarily intend it to be. And because they were all based out of the L.A. area, they were never going to win too many awards from Music Row. But they did arguably have a hand in setting some musical templates for what came about in the 1990’s (IMHO).
The reverb and lazy vocals echo the narrator’s stunned realization that he still believes in his lover even after ” a year and forever.”
The line “dream a song in my heart” alone elevates this performance to another level for me.
This song just sounds cool.