We were driving home from Syracuse, a college visit trip that extended into our wedding anniversary. It was a beautiful late autumn drive, seeing the huge windmills scattered across as we drove over and through there Catskill mountains. The playlist was banging out tunes, and when “Wasted” came on my wife had no idea it was Def Leppard. There’s something about On Through The Night, that first album that sounds like a 70s album even though it came out in 1980. It’s just raw and rough and fun in a way the ultra-polish of the Robert “Mutt” Lang years would lose, despite the many accolades and dollars his production would bring to the band. That song led to a rabbit hole of early 80s hard rock that I still haven’t relinquished almost two weeks later, so why not dig in and understand what about this debut I like so much?

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