Glass Tiger revitalized
It’s worth noting the roots of two Canadian musical phenomena lie in the Scottish region of Lanarkshire, on the outskirts of Glasgow.
Alan Frew, frontman for 1980s pop sensation Glass Tiger, and country/soul hitmaker Johnny Reid both hail from the area, about 20 miles and a generation apart, and followed similar paths as their families crossed the Atlantic and both found a home in the Canadian music business.
At some point, a collaboration was bound to happen, and as Glass Tiger keyboardist and cofounding member Sam Reid (no relation to Johnny) put it, it was a major setback that brought the two parties together.
In 2015 Frew suffered a stroke that not only derailed plans for Glass Tiger’s planned 30th anniversary tour, but also cast doubt on whether he’d ever be able to perform again. But after a year of physical therapy, he had a new solo record and was back on stage singing Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone and Someday for a legion of Canadian fans.
One of those fans was Johnny Reid, who ran into Frew backstage at a music event, and congratulated him on his recovery and the role that music played in it. Reid also confessed that he wore out his copy of Glass Tiger’s debut The Thin Red Line after moving to Canada in the 1980s and still knew every song by heart.
“It sounds a bit like a cliche, but it did refocus certain things for us,” says Sam Reid. “Johnny’s comment to us was you guys have had 30-plus years together, of friendship and brotherhood, and sisterhood and all the stuff that goes with that.
“He told us we should be celebrating that, especially after Alan had recovered.”
Ultimately, Johnny Reid invited Glass Tiger to come down to his home in Nashville to work on a project together, which turned out to be the new album 31, which is largely a collection of reworkings of the band’s bestknown songs with some fresh twists and special guests like Alan Doyle and Julian Lennon.
The project went so well that the invitation also extended to Johnny Reid’s current cross-Canada Revival tour, named after the singer’s latest album but also appropriate for the effect the collaboration had on Glass Tiger and on its catalogue of hits.
“We called it 31 because we missed 30 — and really who cares? — and here we are,” keyboardist Reid said with a chuckle. “The whole thing ended up fitting us like a glove, which isn’t bad considering we didn’t know how that relationship was going to go.
Reid the keyboardist credits Reid the singer/producer with shaking things up and getting Glass Tiger to take a new approach to songs they’d been playing for three decades. The former describes the latter’s Nashville home studio as a musical candy store filed with acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins, and keyboards like a B3 Hammond organ and piano.