D.L. Byron

D.L. Byron, born David Byron, grew up under the care of adoptive parents in southern New Jersey and developed an early passion for the Beatles, the Byrds, and Bob Dylan. During his teenage years he formed several garage bands and collected poetry prizes even while being expelled from multiple exclusive prep schools. He relocated to New York City in February 1971 to focus on music, briefly working at the Colony Record shop on the ground floor of the Brill Building and staying in a $45-a-week fleabag hotel. There he caught the tail end of Tin Pan Alley, securing a $75-a-week staff-writing post at E.H. Morris, where he encountered Harold Arlen and began playing open-mike nights throughout the city. In 1979 Clive Davis and Arista signed him in hopes of creating an American counterpart to Elvis Costello or Graham Parker. His 1980 debut album This Day and Age, produced by Jimmy Iovine with members of Billy Joel’s band, delivered ten tracks of energetic pop/punk reminiscent of the Jam’s In the City and Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and quickly became a power-pop classic; its lead single “Listen to the Heartbeat” reached the Top 40 and generated a popular MTV video. Byron toured extensively across the United States, both headlining and supporting Bob Seger on the Against the Wind tour and the Boomtown Rats on the Fine Art of Surfacing tour. He also cut a version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” for the R.S.O. Records soundtrack to the Tim Curry film Times Square, which featured tracks by the Cure, XTC, Joe Jackson, Suzi Quatro, Lou Reed, the Ramones, Roxy Music, and others. Arista additionally issued a 12-inch single of his cover of “Down in the Boondocks” that included Billy Joel on backing vocals. While preparing demos for a second Arista album, Byron intended “Shadows of the Night” to be the lead single, yet the label deemed the material insufficiently commercial, suspended him for a year, and later released him from his contract at his request. Several artists eventually recorded “Shadows of the Night,” most prominently Pat Benatar, who opened her 1982 LP Get Nervous with the song; the album sold more than four million copies, the track earned the 1982 Grammy for Record of the Year, and it has appeared on numerous compilations and greatest-hits collections. Turning his attention to songwriting, Byron placed material on Benny Mardones’ gold-certified Never Run, Never Hide, Price-Sulton’s Lights On, Drive She Said’s self-titled release, and additional projects despite personal difficulties and substance abuse. In the early 1990s he abandoned drugs entirely, immersed himself in spiritual pursuits, and located his birth mother, discovering that his biological grandfather had owned the music store where Byron purchased his first guitar. He resumed performing and recording, issuing Exploding Plastic Inevitable on Zen Archer/Fountainbleu Records in 1998; the album adopted a folkier tone than This Day and Age, drawing comparisons to Marshall Crenshaw and Tom Petty while retaining Byron’s pop craftsmanship. In 1999 he co-headlined a U.S. tour with two other Fountainbleu artists, began writing songs for a new album, and contributed a track to a Gene Clark tribute collection.