I was just like, “What?” And then I didn’t even think anything of it. I was listening to that track in my bedroom, recapping it, and she walks by - usually she never speaks to me - and stops at the door and goes, “Is that yours?” I go, “Yeah, we just recorded it.” And she says to me - she doesn’t know anything about the music business - “You better not play that for anybody, and you’d better get that copyrighted, because that’s a huge song.” And then she walked away. I’m the youngest of 10 kids, and I have this older sister, Fatima, who really didn’t pay attention to what I was doing in music, didn’t like any of the bands I was in. I think we might have played it at a club that week.īettencourt: I remember going home to Hudson, which was like 45 minutes away. We were just in a groove writing, and that was just another song. We wrote it and then just threw it down four-track.Ĭherone: Nuno was on the porch strumming, he showed it to me, I ran in my bedroom and scribbled the first “More than words is all you have to do” - and it was obvious, after you read the first verse to go, “OK, that’s the title.” You think it’s genius but it’s an accident. I remember we always demoed everything straight away.
Nuno Bettencourt, guitar: It was literally on Gary’s fuckin’ porch in Malden. In honor of this unique moment, we caught up with important players in the “More Than Words” story. These days, Cherone has been working with a band called Hurtsmile, Bettencourt has been Rihanna’s tour guitarist since 2009 and Extreme are currently touring behind the 25th-anniversary reissue of Pornograffitti. In June 1991, it hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, bookended by Mariah Carey’s pleading “I Don’t Wanna Cry” and Paula Abdul’s winsome “Rush Rush.” The black-and-white video for “More Than Words” became an MTV staple and received one of pop’s highest honors - being parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic. “There are a lot of hopes pinned on this song,” wrote Kim Neely, who noted that between the time of that interview and the piece’s publication, the song had risen to the Number 10 spot on the rock charts.Ĭhasteness, Soda Pop, and Show Tunes: The Lost Story of the Young Americans and the Choircore Movement The piece ends with the band hearing “More Than Words” on a Boston radio station. An April 1991 profile of Extreme in Rolling Stone talked about how the band had been slogging it out and trying to find a commercial breakthrough - at the time, the album had sold about 300,000 copies. The album’s first two singles, the bombastic “Decadence Dance” and the horn-assisted “Get The Funk Out,” were relegated to the late-night wilds of Headbangers Ball. Its spare harmonies served as a widening of space after four powerhouse songs augmented with horns, double-entendres, Gary Cherone’s showmanship and Bettencourt’s fleet guitar playing. It even stood out in the context of 1990’s Extreme II: Pornograffitti, a wide-lens concept album. “More Than Words” was an anomaly in not just pop, but hard rock acoustic guitars were standard in many a power ballad, but they were often surrounded by bombastic production and splashy solos. The song eventually hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, an outcome that surprised many - including the members of the band, who were ready to start work on a follow-up album when it began climbing the charts. “More Than Words,” a comparatively modest single by the Boston hard-rock band Extreme, stuck out - just two voices and an acoustic guitar, with harmonies that recalled the classic pop balladry of bands like the Beatles or the Everly Brothers. In the spring of 1991, the radio landscape was bursting with high-energy dance-pop and heavily emotional ballads.
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