The Box is a Canadian pop rock band from Montreal, Quebec, whose style evolved from synth-based new wave pop on their early albums toward prog-influenced guitar rock later in their careers. Founded in 1981, they achieved commercial success in Canada, recording four charting albums and 10 charting singles between 1984 and 1990. This iteration of the group has released two further albums.
Biography
The band was formed in 1981 by Jean-Marc Pisapia, an early member of Men Without Hats.
In 1985, The Box released All the Time, All the Time, All the Time. That album, which included backing vocals by Sass Jordan and Marie Carmen, produced the singles "My Dreams of You" and "L'Affaire Dumoutier (Say to Me)". The latter song, in which Pisapia narrates, rather than singing, a tale of a murder committed by a man with multiple personality disorder, was opposed as a single by the record label due to its unconventional sound, strange subject matter, and bilingual lyric (which required English listeners to understand French if they wanted to understand the full story, including the climactic punchline) but the label relented due to the strength of its cinematic music video, which was constructed as a mid-century European crime thriller film with Pisapia playing the police detective. Pisapia, who to this day considers it the best song he ever wrote, and were nominated for the Juno Award for Most Promising Group of the Year at the Juno Awards of 1985.
1987's Closer Together was the band's most commercially and critically successful album. Featuring the hit singles "Ordinary People", the title track, and "Crying Out Loud for Love", the album was certified platinum. Backing vocals on the album were provided by Jordan and Martine St. Clair. The band's biggest hit, "Closer Together", was originally commissioned for a fundraiser for an anti-leukemia foundation.
The band received a Juno nomination for Group of the Year at the Juno Awards of 1987, and won the Félix Awards for Anglophone Group of the Year, Anglophone Single of the Year and Video of the Year. In 1988, they won the Rock Express reader poll for Best Canadian Group and Best Canadian Album.
After touring for more than eighteen months, the band took six months off to recover before returning with 1990's The Pleasure and the Pain, produced by Martin Rushent. That album was a commercial disappointment; Pisapia attributed this in part to the band's position as francophones who were performing in English instead of French, causing their fans in Quebec to turn against them in the increasingly polarized climate of the Meech Lake era, and to the album having represented a compromise between his musical vision and label pressures to make a mainstream rock album that could break them into the United States.
Pisapia also later asserted that the nearly two years of constant touring between Closer Together and The Pleasure and the Pain left the band burnt out and exhausted,
The Box disbanded in 1992 after releasing the greatest hits compilation A Decade of Box Music.
Pisapia revived The Box with a new lineup in 2002, issuing two new Box tracks (recorded in 1996 and 2002) on a new hits compilation, Always in Touch With You. The album, a concept album about a young man from the Canadian Prairies who becomes an astronaut but gets caught between parallel universes when his spaceship explodes, was inspired by Pisapia's love of progressive rock bands such as Genesis, Pink Floyd and Gentle Giant.
By the 2010s, the music industry had changed so much that Pisapia felt no need to create entire albums. "Back in the 80s, it was very simple... Today, even the most experienced executive in a record company doesn’t know where to start." Pisapia had begun painting, but still had his own recording studio for when he got "the urge" to make music. The Box released several singles (in both English and French) and a four song EP, Take Me Home during this decade.
!QC
|-
| rowspan="3"| 1984
! scope="row"| "Walk Away"
| 48
|46
| rowspan="3" align="left" | The Box
|-
! scope="row"| "Must I Always Remember"
| 82
|—
|-
! scope="row"| "Dancing on the Grave"
| —
|—
|-
| rowspan="2"| 1985
! scope="row"| "With All This Cash"
| —
|—
| rowspan="3" align="left" | All the Time, All the Time, All the Time
|-
! scope="row"| "L'Affaire Dumoutier (Say to Me)"
| 21
|18
|-
| 1986
! scope="row"| "My Dreams of You"
| 51
|30
|-
| rowspan="3"| 1987
! scope="row"| "Closer Together"
| 13
|2
| rowspan="4" align="left" | Closer Together
|-
! scope="row"| "Ordinary People"
| 16
|10
|-
! scope="row"| "Crying Out Loud for Love"
| 40
|8
|-
| 1988
! scope="row"| "I'm Back"
| —
|—
|-
| rowspan="3"| 1990
! scope="row"| "Carry On"
| 12
|3
| rowspan="3" align="left" | The Pleasure and the Pain
|-
! scope="row"| "Temptation"
| 39
|4
|-
! scope="row"| "Inside My Heart"
| 20
|7
|-
| rowspan="1"| 2014
! scope="row"| "Les plus belles années de ta vie"
| —
|—
| align="left" | (Single only)
|-
| rowspan="1"| 2015
! scope="row"| "Life is a Party"
| —
|—
| align="left" | (Single only)
|-
| rowspan="1"| 2015
! scope="row"| "Trop Loin"
| —
|—
| align="left" | (Single only)
|-
| rowspan="1"| 2016
! scope="row"| "Incredible Human Being"
| —
|—
| align="left" | (Single only)
|-
| colspan="11" style="font-size:8pt" | "—" denotes releases that did not chart
|-
|}
Albums
Original studio albums
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!rowspan="2"|Release date
!rowspan="2"|Title
!colspan="1"|Chart positions
|- style="font-size:smaller;"
!width="90"|Canada<br>RPM Album charts
|-
|May 1984
|The Box
|align="center"|95
|-
|January 1986
|All the Time, All the Time, All the Time
|align="center"|73
|-
|March 1987
|Closer Together
|align="center"|25
|-
|March 1990
|The Pleasure and the Pain
|align="center"|31
|-
|June 1995
|John of Mark†
|align="center"|-
|-
|March 2005
|Black Dog There
|align="center"|-
|-
|November 2009
|D'Après le horla de Maupassant
|align="center"|-
|-
|March 2018
|Take Me Home (EP)
|align="center"|-
|}
† Originally issued as by "John of Mark"; reissued by The Box in 2015.
Compilation albums
- A Decade of Box Music (1992)
- Always in Touch with You: The Best of the Box (2002)
- The Best of the Box (2007) CD + DVD