REVIEW: Mr. Big – Lean Into It (1991)

Today, the album.  Tomorrow, the singles!  Yes it’s a two-part Mr. Big feature!  Happy long weekend, hope you’re partying safely!  

MR. BIG – Lean Into It (1991 Atlantic)

Yeah yeah yeah…”To Be With You”!   As Mr. Big said themselves on a later album, “Get over it”!

I’ve always considered Mr. Big to be more shred-lite than glam metal or pop metal. After all, with credentials like these…Talas…Racer X…Impelliteri…these guys know how to play. Eric Martin is a unique blue-eyed-soul singer, one of a kind, absolutely brilliant.  Martin and the band also know how to write catchy hard rock tunes. Combine that with their playing pedigree and adventurous arrangements, and I’ll call ’em shred-lite if you let me. And this is a pretty damn good album for rockers who want just a touch of integrity in their pop.

The opener kicks you right in the nuts with one of the best Big tunes ever, “Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song)” (whew).  The album starts with an adrenaline rush straight to the head.  Why the “Electric Drill Song”?  Because it opens with the sound of Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan playing their instruments with electric drills with guitar picks glued to the bit!  In unison?  Basically spoofing the whole “How fast can you play?” question, Big’s creativity make this speed rocker a standout.

“Alive and Kickin'” is nothing more than a hard rocker with soulful vocal and killer chorus, but “Green-Tinted Sixties Mind” is classy and cool. Pure pop with an incredible retro melody and adventurous guitar arrangement, this first single went tragically ignored.  I don’t remember it getting much airplay though it deserved it.  I’m not sure if the world of 1991 would have accepted a song like this from a hard rock band.

“CDFF – Lucky This Time” is another weird title. See, “CDFF” stands for CD Fast Forward which is the sound you’re hearing at the opening of this rather ordinary ballad. The only thing really oustanding about this song is Billy’s rumbling bass groove.  The guy doesn’t sound like anybody else, and he raises the song to another level.  “CDFF”  is followed by the cool and swampy “Voodoo Kiss”, which ended side 1 of the original album.

Side 2 kicked off with another pop rocker, “Never Say Never”, co-written by Canada’s own Jim Vallance. Catchy but non-descript. “Just Take My Heart” is the second ballad, and a forgettable song to me. “My Kinda Woman” kicks the adrenaline back in. Yet it is Paul Gilbert’s “A Little Too Loose” that rekindles the creative fires on this album. Bluesy and fun, this was one of the high points of this record. “Road To Ruin” shows off the vocal harmonies of the guys, all good singers in their own right. It’s another creative arrangement. Then, of course, the album ends with “To Be With You” which, hard to believe, was actually a really creative song too!  Before it got played to death. Now, it’s the typical rock ballad, but at the time of release, it was very different from the kind of ballads that other bands were putting out, except possibly Extreme.  It has a sparse, vocal-oriented arrangement, an acoustic guitar solo, and no drums to speak of.

Tomorrow we’ll be talking about two singles from this album “Green-Tinted  Sixties Mind”, and “To Be With You” itself, both of which have worthwhile rare songs!

4/5 stars

12 comments

  1. This was a good followup but not as good as the debut in my book!
    Green tinted Sixties mind in my estimation is one of the best songs on this record and usually for me it’s not so much the singles that carry a whole album for me but in this case it does!
    The second best track for me would be Alive &Kicking..whenever I would put this on I would start at track 2 I just found that I was tired sometimes of all the ego driven overplaying that some songs show EXCEPT for Vai/Sheean on the Eat Em record..I could listen to that all day esp with the way Roth was writing back than..anyways not to go to afar from said project this was a good record just for me like I said earlier,not as solid as the debut !
    True Story…..Mike and fellas I’m sure u all can relate if not to this artist but to other artists …
    I basically bought this album the week it came out in 1991 and of course it took a while for it to catch on with the public until the BIg Single but a full yr later(June 1992) I remember standing behind a 12 year old kid at HMV and him asking the clerk ..
    “Hey you got that new Mr BIg cassette??”……
    I than realized when the 12 yrs old a asking…..
    There making some cash!!!!!

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    1. Bwahahaha! That 12 year old would probably pass out if he heard EEAS!

      I think albums like this and EEAS present jaw-dropping musicianship in a palatable way. They write these poppy songs, they have an accessible singer, and on top of that these raging solos. Guys like Mr. Big opened my ears to some different sounds back then.

      Shame that grunge essentially killed them off on the third album.

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  3. I remember being surprised years ago to hear ‘to be with you’ wasn’t indicative of the rest of the record. Overplayed absolutely, but it’s fun to bring out at a campfire 20 (I guess now 22!) years later. I still love the harmonic at the end of the guitar solo!

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    1. Yes! Isn’t that fantastic?

      The first record is very different from this one. It’s less about the catchy songwriting and more about the playing and the soul. It’s interesting, I don’t like it as much as this one but it’s close.

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  4. I had a buddy who had this on tape, back in high school. We used to fast forward through To Be With You.

    I just thought it took a lot of balls to put a trainwreck on the cover. It was up to the band to prove it wrong. It was half a lifetime ago, last time I heard most of those songs, but my dim and distant memory says they did.

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  5. I remember when the Mr Big’s debut came out. I was floored. Still love it. But I got a bit disappointed in this one. Sure, it has some really good songs, but in my book, too many fillers. I actually think that this is the weakest album by the original line up. Still, it’s not a bad album.

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    1. For me I considered Bump Ahead to be the least of the original albums. But they turned me back again with Hey Man which I consider one of their best gems. Take Cover is just incredible!

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