Stan Bush

Guitarist and vocalist Stan Bush earned recognition among AOR enthusiasts through the melodic yet hard-edged pop/rock records he cut throughout the 1980s, both solo and alongside his group Barrage. His professional start came inside the AOR outfit Boulder, whose lone Elektra album appeared in 1979. A subsequent Columbia contract yielded the 1983 solo debut Stan Bush, whose songs leaned into the Rick Springfield-inflected power-pop wing of the genre; one track, “All American Boy,” later received a cover by Y&T.

Bush then assembled Barrage, whose lineup included guitarist Don Kirkpatrick, keyboardist Rick Seratte, bassist Mike Seifrit, and drummer Jack White. The resulting 1987 release Stan Bush & Barrage featured “The Touch,” adopted as the theme for Transformers: The Movie, and quickly attained cult status among AOR collectors, many of whom still regard it as his strongest effort. Additional soundtrack placements followed: “Heart vs. Head” for the 1987 Charlie Sheen film The Wraith and “Never Surrender” for Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1989 picture Kickboxer.

When Every Beat of My Heart arrived in 1991, the peak era of AOR had already waned; despite co-writing assistance from Jonathan Cain of Journey and Bad English plus Jim Vallance, the album drew scant domestic notice. Bush nevertheless sustained an overseas audience in Europe and Japan, issuing the import-only Dial 1-818-888-8638 in 1994. Two years later The Child Within produced unexpected domestic success: “Until I Was Loved by You” earned an Emmy for Best Original Song after its use on the soap opera Guiding Light, while “Capture the Dream” received prominent placement during NBC’s broadcast of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

A 1999 retrospective, Capture the Dream: The Best of Stan Bush, appeared alongside Heaven, a set of previously unreleased post-1987 Barrage recordings. Language of the Heart followed in 2001, its songs largely co-written with producer Curt Coumo.

With the Transformers property returning via its first live-action feature in 2007, Bush offered two new tracks to the filmmakers; although they were omitted from the official soundtrack, both surfaced as bonus cuts on that year’s solo album In This Life. A fresh version of “The Touch” fueled speculation about inclusion in the 2009 sequel Revenge of the Fallen, yet the recording instead graced the well-received 2010 collection Dream the Dream. The song resurfaced again in the video game Transformers: War for Cybertron and on the television series ABC’s The Goldbergs, NBC’s Chuck, and Fox’s American Dad. Bush scored further game-related success when “Warrior,” originally recorded for Shadow Warrior 2, was included on his thirteenth studio album, the 2017 release Change the World.