Don't Look Back (Boston Album)

Don't Look Back (Boston album)

Don't Look Back is the second studio album by American rock band Boston, released in 1978 (see 1978 in music). The title track is one of the band's biggest hits, reaching #4 in 1978 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album sold over 4 million copies in the first month of its release, and has been certified 7x Platinum by the RIAA in the U.S.

This album also marked the beginning of the band's legal fight with its record label Epic Records. Tom Scholz has been on record stating that executives at Epic pushed him and the band into releasing the album before they felt it was ready. He said of Don't Look Back that "it was ridiculously short. It needed another song." Their next album, Third Stage, was not released for another eight years, by which time the band and record label had parted ways and were fighting a courtroom battle that Boston ultimately won.

This album and the group's first (Boston) were remastered and re-released on June 13, 2006. The re-releases were digitally remastered personally by Scholz after he heard (not directly) that the remastering project was to be handled by Sony's team, which he felt was unacceptable. He took it on himself after negotiations with Legacy. "I've always wanted to make those albums sound good on CD, and the chance arrived."

A small number of the Sony-remastered versions briefly went on sale in Canada on April 4, 2006 before being yanked from the shelves. Those discs also included a live version of "Shattered Images" (mistitled "Help Me" on the packaging), an unreleased Boston original, from a 1976 concert in Philadelphia.

Don't Look Back was among the first commercially produced compact discs when the format was introduced in 1983, but because of ongoing legal issues between Tom Scholz and CBS Records, the title was pulled after a small production run and did not re-appear on CD until three years later. Inserts for the original CD pressings contained the "spaceship blueprints" from the original album dust jacket; those illustrations were not included in the 1986 re-release.

It has been posited that the cover art for this album inspired the box art on the Atari 2600 release of the video game Space Invaders.

Also, the original title for this album was supposed to be Arrival, but Boston members discovered that ABBA already had an album by that name out, so Don't Look Back was chosen instead. The album was listed erroneously as "Arrival" in the cassette inserts of some other CBS releases at the time promoting albums available from the record company and its associated labels.

Tom Scholz has claimed in many interviews that he listens to the song "The Journey" before he goes to bed each night.