The 1990s File Feature
Love Is On The Way
Love Is On The Way: How Saigon Kick Crossed Hard Rock Into the Ballad ChartsSaigon Kick was a hard rock band formed in Miami, Florida, in 1988, consisting of…
01 The Story
Love Is On The Way: How Saigon Kick Crossed Hard Rock Into the Ballad Charts
Saigon Kick was a hard rock band formed in Miami, Florida, in 1988, consisting of Matt Kramer on lead vocals, Jason Bieler on guitar, Tom Defile on bass, and Phil Varone on drums. The band developed a reputation for guitar-driven hard rock that blended elements of classic rock, glam metal, and melodic hard rock, and they released their debut album on Third Eye Records before signing with Atlantic Records and releasing their second album, The Lizard, in 1992. It was from that album that "Love Is On The Way" emerged as a breakout single demonstrating the commercial potential of acoustic ballads within hard rock contexts.
"Love Is On The Way" was written by Jason Bieler and stood in sharp contrast to much of the surrounding album's content, presenting a stripped-back acoustic ballad in the midst of a hard rock collection. Bieler composed the song as a piano and acoustic guitar piece, and its arrangement featured none of the electric guitar distortion or aggressive rhythmic attack that characterized the rest of the band's output. The recording was anchored by Matt Kramer's vocal performance, which the ballad format allowed to operate with a sensitivity and expressiveness that the more aggressive surrounding material did not require or accommodate in the same way.
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on September 5, 1992, debuting at number 97. Its chart trajectory over the following months was one of the most sustained ascents in the Hot 100 data for that year, climbing steadily through the fall and early winter until it reached its peak position of number 12 on December 12, 1992. The record spent 22 weeks on the Hot 100, an exceptional run that reflected sustained radio airplay and ongoing commercial momentum well beyond the typical promotional cycle for a rock single of the era.
The timing of the single's chart run coincided with a significant moment in the history of rock radio. By late 1992, the success of Nirvana's Nevermind album, released in September 1991, had begun to fundamentally shift the programming priorities of rock radio stations away from the glam metal and hard rock formats that had dominated throughout the late 1980s. Saigon Kick occupied an awkward commercial position, emerging from the hard rock tradition at precisely the moment when that tradition was losing its grip on mainstream radio, and "Love Is On The Way" succeeded in part because its acoustic ballad character allowed it to occupy adult contemporary and mainstream pop formats that were less affected by the grunge revolution sweeping rock radio.
The success of acoustic ballads by hard rock bands was well established by 1992, with examples including "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison, and "More Than Words" by Extreme, the latter of which had reached number 1 on the Hot 100 in 1991 and represented perhaps the closest antecedent to what Saigon Kick achieved with "Love Is On The Way." These precedents demonstrated that rock band ballads could achieve mainstream pop crossover success, and Saigon Kick's achievement extended that established pattern into a market that was simultaneously beginning to close for the parent genre as a whole.
On mainstream radio formats, particularly adult contemporary, the song received extensive airplay through the final months of 1992 and into the new year. This cross-format support contributed to the song's extended Hot 100 run and its significant peak position, elevating it well above what most observers would have predicted for a band whose public identity was rooted in hard rock rather than in the softer pop sensibility that adult contemporary radio typically required of its most prominent entries.
The band's commercial position after the success of "Love Is On The Way" was complicated by the same market forces that had made the song's genre crossover necessary. Atlantic Records had been a home for hard rock throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the market was shifting irreversibly, and the band's subsequent releases did not replicate the crossover success of this single. The song remains the peak of their commercial achievement and the recording for which they are primarily remembered, a testament to the quality of Jason Bieler's songwriting in a mode very different from the band's usual output and to Kramer's vocal range as a performer.
Jason Bieler's decision to fully commit to a ballad format without hedging toward the band's heavier musical identity contributed materially to the record's effectiveness. The production, clean and carefully arranged, supported the emotional content of the song without the sonic clutter that sometimes resulted when hard rock bands attempted to cross into softer territory without fully embracing the format's distinct demands. The result was a record that worked on its own terms, delivering a genuine romantic ballad rather than a compromise between competing aesthetic priorities that might have satisfied neither the band's existing fans nor the adult contemporary audience the song needed to reach to achieve its remarkable chart success.
02 Song Meaning
Acoustic Confession: The Emotional Logic of Love Is On The Way
"Love Is On The Way" is a song of romantic anticipation, of the speaker's certainty that love, though not yet fully present or acknowledged, is approaching. The title functions as a reassurance directed at either the object of affection or, as equally plausible, at the speaker's own doubting self. This ambiguity between outward declaration and inward affirmation gave the song a psychological complexity that distinguished it from simpler romantic proclamations insisting on arrival rather than on the significant and often more emotionally honest state of approach and anticipation.
The choice by Jason Bieler to write a stripped acoustic ballad for inclusion on a hard rock album was significant, and the meaning of that choice extends beyond the specific content of the song to encompass the band's willingness to expose emotional vulnerability within a genre that typically valued hardness, aggression, and ironic distance as markers of authenticity. A hard rock ballad is an exercise in the temporary suspension of those genre norms, and the audience's willingness to accept that suspension, to hear emotional directness from performers whose usual mode is aggressive and controlled, is itself an act of communal trust that the best ballads earn and do not merely receive as a function of promotional investment.
The acoustic arrangement carried substantial symbolic weight. In the vocabulary of popular music, acoustic performance implies unmediated communication, the removal of electronic distortion and amplification as a metaphor for the removal of psychological defenses. A guitarist who normally plays with distortion and volume playing without those modifiers is, in a cultural sense, playing without armor, and audiences receive that distinction and respond to it with the openness that vulnerability invites when it is presented convincingly and without obvious calculation or strategic manipulation.
The song's commercial success in late 1992 reflected in part the emotional needs of an audience navigating a moment of cultural transition. The early 1990s were a period of significant economic uncertainty, social anxiety, and cultural change, and pop songs that offered reassurance and affirmation of love's eventual arrival addressed real emotional needs in their listeners. The song did not pretend to resolve difficulty or offer premature resolution; instead, it insisted on the possibility of resolution, on the approaching rather than the arrived, which was a psychologically honest position avoiding the false comfort of triumphalist romantic declaration. That honesty about timing and uncertainty gave the song credibility with audiences who might otherwise have been suspicious of romantic optimism from a hard rock band operating in a difficult market.
For Matt Kramer as a vocalist, the song required a performance mode fundamentally different from what hard rock demanded. The absence of amplified guitar work meant that his voice carried more of the song's emotional burden than was typically the case, and the intimacy of the acoustic setting meant that subtle expressive choices were audible in ways they would not have been in a louder production environment. The performance succeeded because it met those demands fully, delivering emotional directness without sentimentality and conviction without melodrama, qualities that the best romantic ballads require and that the best performers in the tradition reliably provide when the material is genuinely worthy of that level of committed interpretation.
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