Bound For Glory

Album: All Hell Breaks Loose (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This was the first single released by Black Star Riders, a hard rock group who evolved from the touring version of Thin Lizzy, assembled by guitarist Scott Gorham after the death of the band's leader Phil Lynott. The lineup consists of ex Lizzy members Gorham, vocalist Ricky Warwick, guitarist Damon Johnson and bassist Marco Mendoza and they recruited experienced drummer Jimmy DeGrasso to complete the outfit. The song received its first airplay on March 21, 2013 on Ken Bruce's mid-morning show on BBC Radio 2 in the UK.
  • The song recreates the vintage Thin Lizzy vibe. Scott Gorham told Songfacts: "I think a lot of that was because we had just come off of basically three years of heavy Thin Lizzy touring. So obviously that's going to rub off somewhere along the lines onto the next thing you're going to do. So I don't think it was on purpose that it panned out that way. It's just there were a lot of subliminal things that were going on and it just kind of turned out that way."
  • The song was never demoed in any format. DeGrasso explained to TheyWillRockYou: "It was something that Damon and I had been messing around with in an LA rehearsal room the day before we went to the recording studio. Damon was, like, 'I've got these chords and I have this idea. Let's just jam on this.' We started messing around with it, and within about thirty minutes, we had this thing pieced together. We did a little changing here and changing there and I thought it had some potential for a cool song and didn't really think much of it because we already had a lot of material all ready to go. We took it and tracked it a couple of days later with Kevin [Shirley, producer] and I thought it was really starting to sound good. Then Scott came in and he added a guitar lead. I was in the control room with Kevin and we both started laughing and then we both said, 'OK, now it sounds like Thin Lizzy!' As soon as you put Gorham on it, it sounds like Thin Lizzy."
  • Black Star Riders was named by Ricky Warwick for an outlaw gang in the film Tombstone.
  • Warwick described this tune's meaning as, "a song for the lost but never lonely, walking tall in the face of everyday adversary. Everyone has a story to tell. Revolution begins in the mirror!!!"

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