More Than a Feeling

The guitar comes in like sunrise. Not sudden—gradual. Building. Layering. Tom Scholz in his basement with a four-track and a dream, stacking harmonies until they became a cathedral.

This isn’t a song. It’s architecture.

Everyone knows the opening. It’s been in a thousand commercials, a hundred movies, every classic rock station’s hourly rotation since 1976. But familiarity breeds laziness. We stop hearing it. We let it become wallpaper.

Don’t do that. Put on headphones. Listen to what Scholz actually built.

He was an MIT engineer. He designed his own equipment, his own effects, his own everything. The recording industry said you couldn’t make an album in a basement. He made one of the best-selling debut albums in history in his basement.

“I looked out this morning and the sun was gone.” Brad Delp’s voice—God, that voice. Clear as glass and twice as fragile. He could hit notes that shouldn’t exist outside of opera houses, but he made them sound effortless. Natural. Like that’s just how humans sing.

The solo isn’t showing off. It’s telling the second half of the story the lyrics couldn’t finish. Every bend, every sustain, perfectly placed. Not a note wasted.

“It’s more than a feeling.” Yeah. It is. It’s proof that obsession and talent and five years of refusing to compromise can turn into something that outlives you.

Brad Delp is gone now. Tom Scholz is still tinkering in basements somewhere, probably still chasing the perfect tone.

But for four minutes and forty-four seconds, they caught lightning. And forty-eight years later, the lightning hasn’t faded.