In December of 1985 Bill Bearg drove his brother Steve, Dave Pazourek, and me to Crystal Mountain to go skiing. Steve and Bill had Rossignol skis, and Dave and I rode K2s. We all wore Vuarnet sunglasses. The albums listened to while driving were: Scritti Politi, New Order, The Bronski Beat, The Violent Femmes, Tangerine Dream, and Forever Young by Alphaville. The simple classical music for dummies song structures of Alphaville became an obsession for me after hearing it for the first time on this drive. I can write songs like that. Alphaville is a German new wave band with 2 hits: Big in Japan and Forever Young. Big in Japan's opaque lyrics I now assume have something to do with European and American musicians touring Japan and perhaps making it bigger than they might have in their own countries, giving a nice kick start to their popularity. Like Cheap Trick. Or the Scorpions. Or Queen, Bon Jovi, Neil Sedaka, and The Osmonds. Forever Young, the 2nd hit from the album, is basically Pachelbel's Canon in D with a drum beat and ethereal lyrics. Forever Young was the first song I learned when I got a Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer from Gary Gonter at Bandstand Music in Tacoma. The keyboard solo is surprisingly similar to Eddie Van Halen's in Jump (played backwards). The song's sappiness was apparent as it played during most high school dances in the late '80s (like my band Stationary Voices did at Peninsula High School in 1986), but the song does have legs: JayZ covered it in 2016. This album in its entirety gave a blueprint of how far sound technology had come. I later got a Casio CZ-1 from Jack at Sluggo Music on 6th avenue in Tacoma and learned every song on the album. Steve Baerg, who had a Yamaha DX-7, and I started a dual synthesizer band called The Twigs (oddly no one asked us to play in public). The synthesizers and drum machines used in this album were not only cool, but they were ones you could buy yourself and make similar music: Roland Juno 106, Akai AX-60, Korg Wavestation, Oberheim OB-XA, Roland TR-505 and TR-808, etc. These keyboards now carry the same type of nostalgia as an original Intellivision or Nintendo game. You can store their entire sound banks on a single pen drive, making the shells antiquated. There are 2 songs on this album, To Germany with Love and Fallen Angel that are the hidden gems of this album. These are keyboard compositions that flow seamlessly into new age thought (easily by-passing the theme of love that most people attribute to them). This album is Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Scientology, Utopianism, all rolled into a few difficult, yet heavenly moments on the dance floor with Napoleon Dynamite.