Detroit rocker, Bob Seger, is back with his eighteenth studio album entitled, I Knew You When. The album was produced by Seger himself and is available as a ten-track standard edition, or a thirteen-track deluxe edition.
With I Knew You When, Seger continues to be the torchbearer of that “Old Time Rock N Roll”, but at 71, Seger is clearly in a reflective mood with a set of songs that contain an undercurrent of sentiment, politics, and mortality. The album also has two songs dedicated to his departed friend, Glenn Frey, I knew You When and Glenn Song.
Overall, I Knew You When is a solid Bob Seger album providing fans with fist-pumping arena-fillers and tender ballades. The only minor flaw with Seger’s 18th studio album is that some of the rock songs seem to be taken from a different era. Runaway Train sounds like an overproduced 80’s rocker that channels Segers own 1987 hit, Shakedown. The Sea Inside is a subpar homage to Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. These two tracks are so awkward that they make the album a bit incoherent which in turn overshadows the fact that I Knew When boasts some of Seger’s strongest set of songs in decades.
