The debut Revolution Saints album was number 5 on my 2015 list. And they just released their 3rd album this year.

Revolution Saints is a supergroup of musicians who have been around for a long time.

Deen Castronovo (was discovered by Neal Schon and was then given a chance to play in Bad English by Schon) is on drums and vocals. It was a shame that a few months after this album was released, he was in the press for all of the wrong reasons. He even lost his Journey drumming gig because of it.

Doug Aldrich can shred and he helped prolong the careers of artists like Dio and Whitesnake, while Jack Blades has a stellar resume with Night Ranger, Damn Yankees and writing songs for other artists with Tommy Shaw. But the star of the album is an Italian songwriter called Allessandro Del Vecchio. He’s like the Desmond Child or Jim Vallance or Max Martin for Frontiers Records president Serafino Perugiono.

And “Locked Out of Paradise” is written solely by Alessandro Del Vecchio. There is a live version of the song on the “Light In The Dark” deluxe version, which shows the power of the song.

The palm muted intro for the first 20 seconds and then the power chords come crashing in with metronome drum rolls precision from Castronovo supplementing the build into the verses.

From about 38 seconds we are into the verse. Its rocking, its melodic and it builds nicely into the pre-chorus and that tasty arena rock chorus.

“We’ve been locked out of paradise, we lost our battle to survive”

Paradise is this elusive utopian refuge we try to get to. But we can’t quantify it or measure how far we need to go to get there, so we keep chasing it. My view to get there, is drip by drip, little steps at a time and trying to make each day, each week, each year, each decade better than the previous.

“Bring your heart to me, what do you touch?, I’m just a man with a hope”

Because in the end all we do is hope. We feel that our expectations and desires for a particular thing to happen are getting closer to the event. So we keep hoping. Some keep praying. And we keep going.

For the debut album, the songs were already written by other writers, so all Aldrich had to do was learn the riffs, put his unique spin on them and then work out what he needed to do for the solos.

Which are quality.

The lead break for this song is well-structured and well thought out, as Aldrich pulls out various techniques from his arsenal. It starts off melodically, builds nicely and ends with a guitar acapella two bar shred fest before moving back into the song.

By the end, I am pressing repeat just to hear that intro again and that guitar solo.