LOVE SICK - Garry Manuel - A Retro Pop/Disco Hit

On February 28th, 2025 Love Sick was released, but, that’s not the whole story!

In February, forty six years ago (to the month) Garry was performing in a Top 40/Disco cover band; however, he figured disco was here to stay for a time and he set out to write a hit song. While the band he was with performed the song almost nightly, the group never did any recording. Garry did. There were a couple times during that year that the band had some down time and that’s when the recording took place, with Craig Fennessy being the recording engineer at his studio in Hilton. Garry cut three tracks that day. Two of those songs have been re-recorded and released (Pray for Rain & Romantic Knots). Love Sick has NOT been redone! It is the original track with the same musicians.

Garry speaks about the track: “It was a hot track that I thought could be a hit. Kerry, who played with us in Sunup, played his ass off on the bass. Since we were playing disco nightly at the time, he had this groove down and played it so well. Also, drummer, Ben Gramm, (Lou Gramm and numerous other Rochester bands) had played on many of the Sunup recording sessions and on their live shows was on drums and one of Ben’s former bandmates, Jack Ortolani, was on keys and you’ll note how he had those disco sprinkles down.” Garry goes on to talk about alterations on the the tune today: “I tried playing congas. There is a portion of the song where we just let the drums keep the groove and I played congas in that spot and in the end. My conga playing was absolutely horrible. So, when my son started working on editing the track and remastering, we tried to isolate the conga track, but other instruments leaked. We couldn’t erase the congas and wound up cutting that section out of the tune, making it even shorter than it was.”

You can listen here: LOVE SICK - Garry Manuel