Can't Fight This Feeling

An enormous, stadium-filling swell of guitars and keyboards that the production manages to keep from collapsing under its own weight through sheer dynamic control. The verses are relatively intimate — Kevin Cronin's voice riding a measured acoustic-driven groove — making the chorus's full-band expansion feel earned rather than imposed. His vocal delivery is earnest to the point of transparency, every syllable meaning exactly what it says, which in another context might seem simple but here reads as genuine. Lyrically it chronicles the specific surrender of a person who has resisted a feeling they can no longer deny, the romantic conversion narrative rendered with unusual specificity about the internal process of capitulation. The piano countermelody in the final section adds harmonic warmth that makes the ending feel like resolution rather than just volume. Culturally it inhabited the early MTV era with songs that understood how to be large without being cold. It belongs in a car on a highway, windows down.