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. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules'īlack Sabbath on the Making of 'Vol. “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. 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.

Extreme do you wanna play