I'm Your Boy: Dan Fogelberg and Peoria, Illinois

Fig 1.

Dan Fogelberg in concert, May 1984. Photo by MediaPunch Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

On a snowy Christmas Eve, 1975, the Fogelberg family of Peoria, Illinois, celebrated by enjoying some Irish coffees. Unfortunately, they were missing an important ingredient—whipping cream. The Fogelberg's youngest son, Dan, a musician who had released his second solo album (Souvenirs) the year before on Epic Records, and was visiting for the holidays, headed out to fill the order. With most stores closed, he ended up at the Convenient Food Mart, located at the top of Abington Street hill. Browsing the aisles, Fogelberg came across someone he knew—Jill Anderson, his onetime girlfriend during their school days at Woodruff High School, class of 1969. A schoolteacher in Chicago, Anderson had come to the store in search of another holiday staple: eggnog. The two decided to catch up on each other's lives, sharing a six–pack of beer (Olympia) in Anderson's car before parting ("We drank a toast to innocence/We drank a toast to now/We tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how"). As he started to go to rejoin his family, Fogelberg, filled with memories of the pain of their breakup long ago, noticed that the snow had turned to rain.¹

Five years later, the chance encounter in the city on the Illinois River had been turned by Fogelberg into a song, "Same Old Lang Syne," released as a single in November 1980 and later included on his seventh album, The Innocent Age, a double LP released in 1981. As he noted in a 1997 interview, he did not usually write fictional songs, preferring to express his own experiences and philosophy, trying to write stories with his music. "If you do it well and honestly, it will connect with other people," Fogelberg said. "Same Old Lang Syne" peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and since its release has become a regular part of the holiday season, played along with other traditional Christmas songs. Although Fogelberg believed the song was important, he had written it "as somewhat of a joke, you know, the first four verses of that were just funny. It really happened, obviously, but I wrote it as a joke one afternoon." Fogelberg sought to stretch himself as a songwriter, seeing if he could do a song "about nothing, about something so inconsequential." As he continued to work on the song, however, its tenderness struck him deeply. "And it started taking on a life of its own," Fogelberg admitted. Powered at its end by a Michael Brecker saxophone solo to the tune of the Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne," a New Year's Eve staple, Fogelberg's tune has engendered both heartfelt emotion and derision from listeners. For examples, while fellow singer/songwriter Jackson Browne said he hated to admit it, but the song made him cry, as it "encapsulated the passing of time and the revisiting of former hopes and dreams," a Chicago newspaperman lambasted the song as "the worst thing to ever come out of Peoria."²

Whatever one's opinion about "Same Old Lang Syne," it showcased the close ties between Fogelberg, who died at the age of fifty-six from prostate cancer, and his hometown, a quintessential midwestern community known best, perhaps, for the ubiquitous question about the viability of everything from plays to consumer products, "Will it play in Peoria?" It was in Peoria where Fogelberg began his rise to musical stardom in a career that began in the early 1970s and lasted until the 2000s, spawning several platinum (a million copies sold) and multiplatinum records, as well as such memorable hit songs as "Part of the Plan," "The Power of Gold," "Longer," "Heart Hotels," "Run for the Roses," and "Leader of the Band." Peoria has remembered its native son, honoring his memory and that of his family by renaming the street near the convenience store he made famous with "Same Old Lang Syne" Fogelberg Parkway in 2008...