1983 · Behind the Songs
The second single from The Distance — born from an abandoned album concept about relationships — became a Top 15 hit and, in Dave Marsh’s words, an anthem of perseverance.
Bob Seger has never been a man for easy sentiment. His love songs come with calluses on them — earned, road-tested, and suspicious of pretty words. “Even Now,” released as a single in March 1983 from the album The Distance, is the love song of a man who had to be talked out of writing a whole album about relationships because he was afraid it would turn maudlin. He needn’t have worried. The single reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 9 on the Cash Box Top 100, number 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and number 35 in Canada — and it did it by being the toughest tender song on the radio that spring.
The track runs four minutes and thirty-one seconds, was written by Seger, produced by Jimmy Iovine for Capitol, and credited to Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, with “Little Victories” on the B-side. But its real story starts earlier, with an idea Seger had for the album itself — and then threw away.
An album about relationships — almost
The Distance, Seger’s twelfth studio album, was released on December 13, 1982, and it very nearly became a concept record. Seger’s original idea, influenced by Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, was to build the whole album around relationships — their beginnings, their middles, their ends. It was an ambitious notion for a heartland rocker, and Seger ultimately abandoned it: the concept, he felt, was turning maudlin, and maudlin was the one thing his music could never afford to be.
What survived the cull tells you what the album was really about. Among the retained songs were “Even Now,” “Love’s the Last to Know,” “House Behind a House,” and “Little Victories” — relationship songs, yes, but relationship songs with their sleeves rolled up. The album reached number 5 on the Billboard chart and sold nearly two million copies in the United States, and its singles told the story in sequence: “Shame on the Moon,” released November 30, 1982, reached number 2 on the Hot 100; “Even Now” followed in March 1983; “Roll Me Away” closed the run that May. Three singles, three moods — and “Even Now” was the beating heart between them.
A tribute to Jan Dinsdale
“Even Now” was, at its core, a love song — and it had a specific addressee. The song was dedicated to Jan Dinsdale, Seger’s long-term partner at the time, and it reads as a tribute to a relationship that had survived the particular pressures of life with a rock star: the tours, the absences, the temptations of the road. Dave Marsh, writing in Rolling Stone, described the track as an “anthem of perseverance” that used “personal relationships as metaphors for a vision of the world” — a love song that was really about endurance itself.
That framing unlocked the song for critics who might otherwise have dismissed it as a ballad. Gary Graff described it as celebrating “triumphing over adversity.” Richard Cromelin, in the Los Angeles Times, heard a song about “lasting values” in a “long-held love.” Bruce Meyer, writing for UPI, called it “a remarkable testament to romantic love.” And Cash Box, in its review, described it as “a tribute to a special person who accompanies one through the journey” — while noting its kinship with “Hollywood Nights,” the surging rocker from Stranger in Town. The tenderness, in other words, came with muscle.
The charts say yes
The numbers confirmed what the critics heard. Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 made it Seger’s second Top 15 single from the album, after “Shame on the Moon.” Number 9 on the Cash Box Top 100 was better still. Number 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart — kept from the top spot in a format Seger had practically invented — proved the song worked for the denim-jacket crowd as well as the pop audience. And number 35 on Canada’s RPM chart rounded out a genuinely international hit.
Billboard’s own review caught the song’s dual nature, praising Seger in his “all-stops-out high-energy rock ’n’ roller” mode — a reminder that this was a love song delivered at full volume, not whispered. Not everyone was converted: Bill Provick of the Ottawa Citizen found it a “routine mid-tempo rocker” with an “almost whiny” chorus. But the dissent only sharpens the consensus. “Even Now” was a love song that rock radio could play without apology, and pop radio could play without irony.
What to listen for
Play it after “Shame on the Moon” and hear the sequence Seger intended: the weary ballad, then the surge of commitment. Listen for the chorus — the one Provick found “almost whiny” and everyone else found anthemic — and decide for yourself. It’s Seger pushing his voice to the edge of its range, the way he always did when the feeling outran the technique.
Then listen for what isn’t there: no irony, no distance, no cleverness. Just a man who once worried that writing about love would make him maudlin, singing about the woman who proved him wrong — at full volume, with the Silver Bullet Band behind him, all the way to number 12. Some love songs whisper. This one shouts, and means it.