I’m going back to the wonderful world of 80’s pop rock for this week’s song pick. Mr. Mister had a brief but successful career and this was one of two mega hits for the group. It was an age where synthesizers and technology were all over music, and Mr. Mister did not squander the opportunity to create something out of it.

Mr. Mister was the brainchild of Richard Page and Steve George, who had a project called Pages in the late ’70’s that didn’t gain much traction. The pair spent the next few years as session musicians for a number of pop luminaries, then formed Mr. Mister to give it another go on their own. They were joined again by their friend John Lang, who did not play in the band but provided lyrics. This time they’d garner a lot more notice.

Broken Wings hails from the group’s second album, Welcome To The Real World, released in late November 1985. While Broken Wings was released as a lead single a few months prior, it would gain hold of the top of the charts in December ’85, and the next single Kyrie would do the same.

Today’s song is a pretty simple one – musically it’s a pop rock thing, perhaps even new wave to some degree, I don’t know. It is electronic based with a lot of delays on the guitars, synth stuff and electronic drums going on. It’s not an “organic” rock song, which personally is fine by me, I’m up for something different once in awhile.

Lyrically the song is pretty easy to grasp – like, get up and fly. It does have a bit of depth to it, this isn’t some vapid pop experience. There’s a longing for a relationship and better times in the song, then the chorus with its motivational “fly again” is a pretty uplifting thing. The song does keep a pretty melancholy tone through it, which is probably why I like it.

There is an interesting quirk lyrically – the line from the chorus “Take these broken wings and learn to fly” is identical to one found in a Beatles song, Blackbird. This was not meant as an homage to the Beatles – rather, lyricist John Lang had read the 1912 book Broken Wings by Kahil Gibran and used that as inspiration. It was described as a totally unintentional aping of Paul McCartney’s lyrics. I don’t recall any controversy over it, but also I was 8 at the time so I probably wouldn’t have noticed, they didn’t air music news during episodes of G.I. Joe.

Mr. Mister scored big with their twin number one singles, but success wouldn’t linger for long. Their next album did not move a lot of copies and their 1990 album Pull was recorded but didn’t interest the label and the band broke up. That album wound up being released a whopping 20 years later. Mr. Mister did not reunite at all, though the members have collaborated on various other projects in the years since.

Broken Wings has remained on airwaves in many forms since its release, through movies and TV, as well as video games. In fact, the inspiration for this post was me hearing the song on my latest playthrough of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where Broken Wings takes up residence with several other pretty damn good songs on the soft rock station Emotion. After the heavy metal pounding of V-Rock, Emotion is probably my next-favorite station on the game.

This song holds up pretty well far outside of the shine of the 1980’s. Of course, that’s just my opinion. But I think Mr. Mister landed a pretty damn good tune with this hit.

For my two parter on the music of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, check out the links below

Part 1 – The Music of Vice City

Part 2 – V Rock