Rockaway - Wrong Side of Love
Rockaway’s third album “Wrong Side of Love” is a collection of songs written again by Larry Rifkin. The 16-song album reflects the influence of the yacht rock music Rifkin grew up listening to with the present-day instrumentation and production that Rifkin’s collaborator, Alasdair MacKenzie, the multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer brings to the project. While they are partners from very different generations, Rifkin will be 74 when the album comes out and MacKenzie is 28, they blend many different influences on this album.
It is a bit different from the first two albums, “It’s Not My Circus” released in 2024 and “Southern Border” which debuted in 2025 in the sense that the political messaging which was front and center in the first two releases is now more subdued and present only in the powerful ballad, “Sleeping with the Enemy,” a demo of which was the last cut on the second album.
The other tracks on this release focus more on love and the beauty of sharing it, the pain of losing it and the desire to try again.
Rifkin, married for 48 years to a remarkable woman, follows on to the suite of three songs he shared on the “Southern Border” album about her with the first song to identify her by name. The song “Are You Still with Me, Carmelita?” conveys the message that life’s twists and turns can test strong relationships as you lose and find each other many times over the years. He is grateful that the answer, in his case, is still ‘yes.’ In the song “My Last First Date,” he reminisces about the early days of the romance with the woman who was ‘the one.’
The title track, “Wrong Side of Love,” is a fresh look at heartbreak. When there is a break-up, there are things you don’t have to do anymore and other things that will haunt you because you had planned happily for them to be part of your future. The song has a haunting refrain when considering that in the aftermath of lost love, “every morning I wake up on the wrong side of love.” The album’s cover captures that loneliness described in the song, but the window into his bedroom offers hope that the sun might shine again on him.
And while love is the predominant theme of the album, Rifkin continues to write songs that have biting social commentary and storytelling. In “The Last American Housewife,” he considers what’s in store for a woman who in this era gave up her own career ambitions to stay home and raise her family. The song, as he was writing it, had echoes of one of his favorite songwriters, Tom Petty. And “For the Others” is a powerful tune inspired by the events surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.
“Speak to the Queen” is Rifkin alone on the keyboard capturing another real-life event when in 1982, unemployed decorator, Michael Fagan, scaled the 14-foot perimeter wall and found his way to Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom. The highly unlikely scenario of having a personal audience with the Queen was documented in the hit Netflix series, “The Crown.” “Movin’ On” is a song about empowerment and perseverance in these tremulous times and found inspiration from one of Rifkin’s favorite songwriters, Curtis Mayfield, of The Impressions.
And while once again Rifkin and MacKenzie trade lead vocals as they did on the “Southern Border” album, they have added a new twist this time. Danny Rivera sings lead on “Ring Shout,” a song about the spontaneous dance rooted in African traditions. (continue reading full bio on our DISCO)