Room In Your Life

The Zoo Crew has got a soft one on the turntable, and the Zoo Freaks are leaning in. Room In Your Life is the sixth cut on V, the fifth album from the Norwegian rock outfit Return, the bunch some folks still file under The Return. It came out in 1992 on EMI Norsk, also tagged Parlophone Norway, and it runs a shade over five minutes at an easy hundred beats a minute. Written by singer Knut Erik Østgård and Nestor Geli, it sits in that wide open AOR lane the band had been driving since the late eighties, strings and spare guitar under a big chorus, the kind of mid-tempo plea that used to fill a dance floor once the power ballads had done their work.

The words are plain and a little bruised. Touch and go, do not waste any more of her precious time, she wants him to collar that heart of his, and he is left wondering why she keeps pushing him aside. Then the hook, the line the whole song hangs on. Is there room in your life for me. Is there room in your heart. Room for anyone. The second verse turns the love into bits of stone. She is running all around, never home, and he only gets time enough to feel her touch before he is left to fight it out alone. By the bridge he is asking the harder question. Is there someone else. It is not a fist-in-the-air anthem. It is a guy standing in the doorway, hat in hand, hoping the answer is yes.

V was cut in June and July of 1992 at Glen Studio in Stockholm and Studio Nova in Oslo, then mixed back at Studio Nova. Ole Evenrud produced it and sang on the sessions. Geir Olav Bøkestad mixed. The core four were still the Stange boys. Østgård on vocals and guitar, Steinar Hagen on guitar and choir, Tore Larsen on bass and choir, Øyvind Håkonsen on drums. Magnus Østvang handled synthesizer. The background stack is worth a double take. Haakon Iversen, Hans Olav Solli, and a young Jørn Lande, years before the metal world knew his name from Ark and Masterplan, all stacked on the vocals. Sleeve notes even joke about a Moccamaster coffee maker getting a performer credit, with Håkonsen listed as the limping horse. These were working musicians who liked their coffee and their inside jokes.

The record only parked on the Norwegian VG chart for a week and peaked at number seventeen, which looks modest until you remember 1992. Grunge had shoved melodic rock off a lot of playlists, and a stack of classy European albums got lost in the shuffle. The band's own booking notes still claim V hit number one on the British import list and went gold in Japan, and the overseas press treated it kinder than the home critics, who had already tagged Return as puddelrock, the Norwegian nickname for polished hair-metal gloss. A Swedish write-up years later called Room In Your Life a plain mid-tempo piece that recalled Roxette's Listen To Your Heart. Fair enough on the surface. Underneath it is the same question the rest of V keeps asking. Life Must Go On, Take This Heart, Friends Will Be Friends, Straight Across My Heart. Can the feeling hold.

Here is the part the Zoo Crew likes best. On the band's own site, both Østgård and Larsen name Room In Your Life, off V, as their favorite Return song. Same line for both of them, and both of them list Dan Reed Network as the artist they reach for when the gig bag is packed. Drummer Håkonsen goes another way, The Loner, and Phil Lynott. Guitarist Henning Ramseth, who came in later, picks Russian Roulette. So the singer and the bass player, the two who have been there since the barn days, still point at this one. That is not a press release. That is two old friends agreeing, on the record, about a deep cut.

The start of the story is a long way from gold records. In 1980, in Stange, out in Hedmark, four teenagers who barely knew each other decided they wanted to play rock. Østgård has told it straight in interviews. Steinar Hagen and Øyvind Håkonsen had already been playing together. Tore Larsen and Knut Erik had been in another band. Nobody else in that farm country was doing it, and the neighbors thought they were crazy. They rehearsed in a barn, and folks walking past liked to pretend it was practice for the national chainsaw championship. Early names were Jom Jom and the Cannibals, then Polish. The crowds were fifteen or twenty buddies. They played punk and ska because that was what they could get their hands on. Around 1983 and 1984 they changed the name to Return, lifted off a synthesizer key, and turned the music toward hard rock. An extra guitarist, Åge Slåtsveen, stuck around long enough for the first single and then stepped off.

The door opened in 1985. Return won NRK's rock championship, Ungdommens Radioavis and the Rockemønstring, with a song called Sheila. It sold about a thousand copies, which was a victory lap in that scene. In the final they knocked out DeLillos, who finished fourth. Years later the band still tells that one dry, from the stage, because the critics who crowned the other Oslo bands never quite warmed to the boys from Stange. The debut album, To The Top, landed in 1987 and moved roughly twenty-five thousand copies. Sing Me A Song sat on Norsktoppen for more than fifty weeks, some counts say fifty-six, some say fifty-seven. Attitudes in 1988 brought Bye Bye Johnny, the slow-dance wrecking ball that ended up on a Swedish power-ballad collection and, much later, streamed past a lot of the so-called big four of Norwegian rock. Straight Down The Line, Fourplay, then V. Five studio albums, and the band's people put the combined sales over six hundred thousand.

Østgård has been clear that Bye Bye Johnny was not some clever sequel. The first draft was about a boy killed in an accident while standing in line for a nightclub. Different story, different scar. That is how these songs got built. Small-town pictures, big choruses, English lyrics aimed at a world past the county line. By 1993, after six years of constant playing, they pulled the plug. They told people they wanted the feeling they had in 1985 back. The break ran long. About eight years later The Best of Return sold close to seventy thousand copies, the shows sold out, and the eighties rock feeling walked back in with them. They have kept at it since, studio records, a live album from Stange, acoustic trio sets with Østgård, Larsen, and Ramseth, and the odd reminder that modest guys from a small town ended up with their own shelf at the National Library. Østgård called that moment a proud one. They had not pictured it in 1987.

Room In Your Life never became the calling card. Bye Bye Johnny and Sing Me A Song did that work. This one stayed the song the singer and the bass player still call their favorite, the one with Jørn Lande buried in the choir, the one that asks a simple question and does not rush the answer. The Zoo Crew figures that is reason enough to let it ride. Zoo Freaks who want the rest of the trail can find the band at the official site, Return, where the favorite-song line is written in plain view, and on the band's Facebook page, Returnofficial. No separate fan page has stayed easy to reach, so the official door is the one that opens. And if the needle on this one has you wanting another deep cut from the stacks, the place to park is THE ZOO, where the Crew keeps the albums spinning and the Zoo Freaks keep the requests coming.