Review Summary: Now that's a great come-back
What happens to a former teenage runaway and glam metal queen when her glory days are behind her and she’s had many years of rough life experiences? She makes an unexpected return with one of her best albums in years, of course.
“Living Like a Runaway” is her 2012 album, after she’d been inactive for most of the 90s and 2000s. It’s somewhat heavier than her previous material, with darker and more personal lyrics, and it works really well, for the most part. For a good example of that, there’s the opener “Branded” and its fast, heavy riff, followed by Lita’s deeper, wearier voice detailing her past relationship with her violent husband, who as she said in the chorus, “never wanted me to leave, so you had me branded”, while the melancholic bridge explains how he managed to gain her trust so he could break her, “just like Satan”.
She had ended her abusive marriage with Jim Gillette from Nitro before making this album, and it’s one of the main topics of her songs. It’s more detailed in “The Mask” and its distorted vocals about how “you drained me of my life, drained me of my blood”, while the more powerful singing on the chorus explains how he managed to put on a good guy mask that fooled everyone, including her, until it was too late.
Sometimes, she has a sadder look at the whole situation, like on the ballad “Mother”, about how her relationship with her sons was damaged by her divorce. You feel all her pain at being separated from her children, in the simple but heart-breaking melody and expressive, almost tearful singing. There’s some debate about whether or not she was a good mother to them, and how much their father had to convince them to hate her. I wasn’t there so I’ll never know what happened exactly, but listening to this album and reading some interviews with Lita, I do believe that her husband was treating her badly and that she was forced to abandon her sons to be free of him. “Please understand why I had to leave, pain was deep, he was hurting me”, as she sings on one of the song’s saddest moments. I think this is the best ballad she's ever made.
But the album covers other dark topics not necessarily related to Lita’s personal life, like on the relentlessly heavy “Devil in my Head” and its haunting, repeated riff about Lita unleashing her inner beast. Or on “Hate” and its catchy, heavy and distorted riff, about a boy who seemed normal and yet there was something off about him… until he ended up killing a bunch of people, for no apparent reason, because as the chorus puts it, he was full of hate. Again, maybe you could read it as a dig at her ex-husband, or as a general darker-than-usual Lita song.
But she’s free from him now, and she can also make songs about more fun yet still personal subjects, like on the super-catchy “Living like a Runaway”, about her leaving home as a teenager and touring the world, as part of The Runaways, completely free yet never safe from danger. The “Run, baby, run” chorus instantly gets in your head. It’s followed by one of the album’s best songs, the powerful, catchy, groovy riffs of “Relentless” with its just as energetic singing, as Lita explains how she never listened to all those people who didn’t want her to be there, because girls shouldn’t play guitar or something, and she had a great career. At this point, after years of playing with The Runaways and as a solo artist, at a time where very few women were doing this, she’s earned the right to brag. You totally feel happy for her, listening to this.
Or you’ll hope that she can find a safe haven, as she explains on “Asylum”, her first attempt at symphonic metal, with the violins on the intro and melancholic feel, while the riffs and melody remind me a little of Metallica’s “The Memory Remains”. I guess Lita’s kind of a female glam metal version of James Hetfield, because while she’s not a technically impressive singer compared to many of her 80s peers, her voice has an immediately recognizable raspy and nasal tone, and her music would be very different without it.
But that’s my opportunity to explain the album’s actual flaws. A lot of the riffs feel borrowed from someone else, or like the kinds of riffs that everyone has already played. At least, Lita plays them well, and I like how she’s using a darker and heavier sound than before, but I just wish she had come up with more original riffs.
Another problem is that the first two thirds of the album, with “Branded”, “Hate”, “The Mask”, and of course “Living Like a Runaway”, “Relentless” and “Mother” are great, but it kind of falls off after those. “Asylum” grows on you after some listens, but “Because I Love to Hate You” is a fun but generic anti-love song duet with her co-guitarist and producer Gary Hoey, and “A Song to Slit Your Wrists By” is the catchy but forgettable ending of the album. However, none of them are truly bad, they’re just not very interesting and only look worse in comparison to what came before them.
But while it has some boring moments, it’s a very good album. The change to a darker sound suits her well, and the album is still really fun in some places. It’s a great 80s revival album, a great break-up album, a great return and the proof that Lita can survive anything. She’s as relentless as she claimed to be.
