JOHN DIVA & THE ROCKETS OF LOVE kick off 2024 with a video for the track “Back In The Days” from their current album, ‘The Big Easy.’ A new year, a new song, and a perfect radio hit, this new single is a melancholy hymn to youth. “Back in the Days” hearkens to a long-lost love and to the unshakeable loyalty of an oath almost forgotten in everyday adult life. Almost…

“Back In The Days” is (of course) a tribute to the music of the eighties, even if the sound and vocals are produced in a much more modern way. Thematically, JOHN DIVA dives deep into the most popular decade of all time, taking to it like a fish to water.

“Remember eighty-something…” he sings at the beginning of every verse. And indeed, everyone has colorful memories of that decade, whether they were there or not. At times it seems almost impossible to distinguish memory from cliché – or from a story that everyone (maybe even your big brother) has perhaps told or experienced.

Take a Trip to “Back in the Days”

“The day you got your first car, you took me swimming in the raw.”

In the 80s, musical visions only imagined came alive before our eyes as MTV would broadcast rock’n’roll clichés into the bedrooms of teen lovers around the globe. DIVA skillfully plays with these images in “Back In The Days” when he sings: “Back in the days, around the campfire, two lost souls living on the run” and almost everyone can feel the brush of this teenage romance that JOHN tells as if it were his own. Perhaps it was…

“The day your mother found out, was the day my father kicked me out.”

Like the great storyteller he is, DIVA weaves a narrative structure around the song’s two protagonists who have long since grown up. He sings of them listening to this song separately on the other side of the world from each other, remembering a time when everything was before them. A time when one song, like those written to perfection by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Phil Lynott, and Brian Adams, meant the world and felt like it could change everything.

Today, JOHN DIVA & THE ROCKETS OF LOVE deliver a new classic. Go ahead and add it to your collection and dream on, teenage lovers. It’s a new year, it’s an old dream!

JOHN DIVA & THE ROCKETS OF LOVE are synonymous with wild parties, and passionate live shows, but also liberal messages in their lyrics. “Back In The Days”, on the other hand, is a rather nostalgic song, the genesis of which JOHN describes as follows:

“As a teenager, I loved these kinds of lyrics, which is funny because as a young person, you can’t feel nostalgia yet. Somehow that feeling was still conveyed, and I always wanted to get to a point in my life where I could write a track like that myself. As I got older, I reached that point. I keep coming back to great songwriters like Bruce Springsteen, a great storyteller. I wanted to write a lyric that I could take from myself and that would provide a point of reference for others. So, my fiction becomes everyone’s fiction. It’s a real challenge to achieve this with just a few lines.”

‘The Big Easy’ Track List:
1) California Rhapsody
2) The Big Easy
3) God Made Radio
4) Runaway Train
5) Thunder
6) Believe
7) Back In The Days
8) Hit And Run
9) Boys Don’t Play With Dolls
10) The Limit Is The Sky
11) Capri Style
12) Wild At Heart
‘The Big Easy’ was released worldwide on March 17th, 2023
via Steamhammer/SPV in the following formats:
=> CD DigiPak
=> LP Gatefold version
=> CD/LP bundle with shirt (only at the Steamhammer Shop)
=> Download / Stream HERE
JOHN DIVA & THE ROCKETS OF LOVE
Live 2024

01.03. DE-Hamburg – Knust
02.03. DE-Kiel – Die Pumpe
08.03. DE-Aschaffenburg – Colos Saal
09.03. DE-Munich – Backstage
12.04. DE-Kempten – Kultbox
13.04. DE-Karlsruhe – Substage
04.05. DE-Koblenz – Cafe Hahn
31.05. DE-Braunschweig – Applaus Garten
19.05. DE-Gelsenkirchen – Rock Hard Festival
26.07. DE-Lampertheim – Open Air
27.07. DE-Kirchberg – Open Air
28.07. DE-Bremen – Seebühne rockt! 2.0
24.08. DE-Haddeby – Baltic Open Air
14.09. DE-Sinntal – Sinner Rock
29.11. DE-Bensheim – Musiktheater Rex
30.11. DE-Burglengenfeld – VAZ
20.12. DE-Nürnberg – Hirsch