CoronaVinyl Day 232 (V): Nightwalker by Gino Vannelli

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is "V," and I only have a couple options by "V" artists left.  Today, we're going with Canadian artist Gino Vannelli's seventh studio album, 1981's Nightwalker.

Vannelli came from a musical family, as he and his brothers Joe and Ross were all involved in the music industry.  Both Joe and Ross contributed to Nightwalker by co-producing the album with Gino, as well as co-writing some songs and/or playing or singing backing vocals.  The follow-up to his platinum-selling 1978 album Brother To Brother, Nightwalker is a combination of blue-eyed soul, yacht rock, and jazz rock.  If you were to listen to this album and have to choose a year it came out, you would likely guess 1981.

Nightwalker reached #15 on the Billboard album chart, his second-highest charting album behind the aforementioned Brother to Brother (#13).  Two songs from the album charted on the Billboard Hot 100, including his second Top 10 hit in the U.S., "Living Inside Myself" (#6), as well as the title track, which just missed the Top 40, reaching #41 (and it was the theme for a Brownsville, Texas NBC station's nightly newscast in the early '80s).

This is another one of those albums where the track listing on the back of the album cover is different than the order of the tracks on the album.  I still don't get why any artist or record company would do that.

Before today, I knew very little about Gino Vannelli, but it turns out he has had a pretty decent career, especially in his native Canada.  He has continued to make music with relative regularity over the last several decades, and he switched his focus more to jazz and classical -- and even performed at the Vatican at Pope John Paul II's request in the early '00s.  All told, he had three Top 40 hits in the U.S., including two Top 10 songs.  In Canada, he had ten Top 40 songs on the Canadian pop chart, including four Top 10s and one #1 (1978's "I Just Wanna Stop"), and he has won 5 Juno Awards.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Seek and You Will Find"
This one is very yacht rocky, but there are a couple of pretty sweet guitar solos.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Santa Rosa"

The intro to this sounds like it could be the intro to an early '80s news magazine TV program.  Then the song turns into a funky rock track.