Rubicon

Rubicon is the track that was left out of the album but, due to a last-minute decision, ended up being part of the definitive sound of Frontiers. While adjusting the tracklist in a meeting with the A&R man from Columbia Records, Michael Dillbeck, the band ended up including this 4:18 track, which, although it never became a single, slipped in as a bridge between the hits that would follow. They weren’t trying to fill gaps in the list: they wanted each song to breathe with the same intensity, and that’s where Rubicon fit like another link in the chain of melodies that defined the early eighties style.

The recording went through the hands of Wally Buck at the recording controls and Kevin Elson and Mike Stone in the mixing, a team that had already worked on the previous album. The raw and direct sound of Rubicon is no coincidence: it was recorded at a time when commercial rock still allowed room for less polished textures, before synthesizers took over everything. When Frontiers hit the shelves in February 1983, no one expected it to become one of those albums that defined a decade. But there it was, with Rubicon as a testament to the fact that sometimes what seems like a last-minute adjustment ends up being part of the magic.