XM plays their inarguably biggest hit, "Miracles", enough. For that song, it's all about the backing vocal arrangement, not as much the main vocals.
For the off-shoot of the psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship (really not to be confused with latter band's off-shoot, Starship) really had their hits with singer Marty Balin's ballads.
Their ballads and rock songs were long in time - not making many of them readily available to top 40 stations, so they kind of remained in album oriented rock channels.
Today's selection, "St. Charles" is another Balin led song, but not quite a ballad, not quite a rock song.
The song comes from their 1976 album, Spitfire, which was the follow-up to Red Octopus. And it preceded 1978's Earth, which had two other huge hits for the band, both sung by Balin.
While he had hand in some of the lyrics for "St. Charles", Balin didn't write the music, but he takes the lead in vocals. The song shines best when Airplane / Starship members, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner join in harmonizing with Balin.
Almost 50 years later (ugh, that hurt to type), I still like the song. The band had a great young guitarist and he shows off here.
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