The 1980s File Feature
Feel It Again
Feel It Again: Honeymoon Suite's Slow-Burning 1986 Rock HitCanada's Power-Pop ContendersBy the time 1986 arrived, Canadian rock was having a genuine moment o…
01 The Story
Feel It Again: Honeymoon Suite's Slow-Burning 1986 Rock Hit
Canada's Power-Pop Contenders
By the time 1986 arrived, Canadian rock was having a genuine moment on the American charts. A small collection of bands from Ontario and beyond had found the formula that let them cross the border commercially without sounding like pale imitations of American acts. Honeymoon Suite, from Niagara Falls, Ontario, was one of the most consistent of these outfits: a melodic hard-rock band with a gift for radio-friendly hooks and a production approach polished enough to compete in the fiercely contested AOR market of the mid-decade.
The Making of a Hard-Rock Single
Feel It Again appeared on the band's second studio album, The Big Prize, released in 1985 and positioned as the vehicle that would take them from solid Canadian success to genuine American recognition. The track has the hallmarks of well-crafted arena rock: a strong rhythmic foundation, guitar work that crackles with controlled energy, and a melody that sits in a vocal range accessible enough to be sung along to at full volume. Vocalist Johnnie Dee delivers the song with the kind of committed intensity that AOR required, selling the emotional content without resorting to melodrama.
Sixteen Weeks of Steady Climbing
The chart trajectory for Feel It Again on the Billboard Hot 100 was one of patient persistence. Debuting at number 86 on March 8, 1986, the track grinded upward week after week, moving through the sixties, the fifties, and into the thirties before reaching its peak position of number 34 on May 10, 1986. It remained on the chart for 16 weeks in total, a sustained run that reflected radio programmers' consistent willingness to spin a track that rewarded repeated listening. Sixteen weeks is a long campaign; it speaks to a song that was earning its airplay rather than coasting on novelty.
The AOR Landscape of 1986
American AOR radio in 1986 was a competitive and well-defined world. The playlist of a typical rock station that year included acts like Foreigner, Heart, REO Speedwagon, and Bryan Adams, all playing variations on the same basic formula of muscular instrumentation and emotionally direct songwriting. Honeymoon Suite fit into that landscape naturally, and Feel It Again found a home on stations that appreciated its craft and its familiarity. The song doesn't try to redefine the genre; it executes the genre's conventions with enough skill and conviction to stand out within them.
The Long Life of a Well-Made Track
Honeymoon Suite never broke through to the very top tier of the American market, but their best work has proven durable within the community of listeners who care about the melodic rock tradition. Over 33 million YouTube views on Feel It Again indicate an audience that has remained loyal and continues to grow through discovery. The track is a reliable presence on 1980s rock playlists and in the catalogs of collectors who know that the second and third tiers of any era's commercial output often contain the decade's most honest music.
Revisit it and feel what the AOR format sounded like when it was operating exactly as intended.
“Feel It Again” — Honeymoon Suite's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Feel It Again: What Honeymoon Suite Were Really Saying
The Plea to Relive a Feeling
Feel It Again is built on one of rock music's most fundamental emotional requests: the desire to return to a peak experience of connection or intensity, to recapture something that has slipped away. The title itself is pure urgency, stripped to three words that say everything about the emotional state the song inhabits. That simplicity is a strength; it makes the song's emotional core immediately accessible regardless of the specific narrative surrounding it.
Nostalgia as Desire
There's an interesting ambiguity at the heart of the lyrical situation. "Feel it again" could refer to a physical encounter, an emotional breakthrough, or a moment of shared understanding between two people who have since drifted apart. The song doesn't insist on a single interpretation; it leaves enough space for listeners to map their own version of the desired experience onto the framework. That openness is part of what made the track work for a broad rock radio audience with varied personal histories and relationship contexts.
The AOR Emotional Register
The melodic hard rock genre that Honeymoon Suite inhabited in 1986 had a characteristic emotional tone: passionate but controlled, vulnerable but never fragile, yearning but forward-moving. These qualities were not accidental; they were cultivated responses to an audience of young men (and significant numbers of young women) who wanted music that validated intense feeling without demanding they surrender their composure entirely. Feel It Again operates precisely within that emotional contract, offering intensity without loss of dignity.
Physicality and Presence
The production reinforces the lyrics' emotional logic. The guitar tone is warm and slightly abrasive at the edges, the drums hit with a physical weight that makes the song feel embodied rather than abstract, and Dee's vocal performance carries a quality of present-tense urgency that stops the track from sounding purely nostalgic. The music isn't looking back passively; it's pushing forward toward the experience it's describing, which gives the whole thing a restless, reaching quality that suits the lyrical content perfectly.
Why the Song Still Connects
The desire to feel something again with the same intensity as the first time is perhaps one of the most universally human experiences there is. It applies to romantic relationships, to music itself, to moments of physical exhilaration or spiritual clarity; the specific object of the desire is almost beside the point. Feel It Again taps into that universal experience with enough musical conviction to carry it across the decades, which explains why listeners who were not born in 1986 still find the track lands with genuine emotional weight when they encounter it on a playlist or a recommendation algorithm.
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