Fantasy Monkey On Your Back Aldo Nova

Fantasy album: Aldo Nova (1982)
Monkey On Your Back album: Subject...Aldo Nova (1983)
Aldo Nova

On Fantasy “I’m okay with it now, but for the longest time I tried to play it down,” singer and guitarist Aldo Nova says about “Fantasy,” his soaring 1982 signature song.

“Some people have said it started the pop-metal genre, and I guess that’s possible. Soon afterward, I saw a lot of bands come in with a similar sound, and that led to hair metal, which I didn’t want to be associated with.”

He laughs.

“But after a while I came around,” he says with a shrug. “It’s a great song and a big hit. What’s not to be proud of?”

In the early 1980s, Aldo Caporuscio was a budding young guitarist and performer in Montreal.

By day he worked at a music store, and at night he played the city’s downtown clubs.

“I did all the Top 40 hits and a lot of new wave covers,” Nova recalls. “More and more, though, people told me they wanted to hear rock, so that’s what I started writing.”

With Led Zeppelin as his North Star (“They had killer riffs, each one as good as a verse or chorus”), Nova came up with a turbo-charged power-chord pattern that felt like a good opener.

From there he started building a song in layers.

“I definitely borrowed from a couple of places,” he admits. “The melody in the verses was kind of based around Christopher Cross’s ‘Ride Like the Wind.’ I even phrased my vocals like he did.

“And there’s a descending guitar line under the riff that’s very much like ‘Dazed and Confused.’ Once I had all those pieces together, I had ‘Fantasy’ ready to go.”

Nova’s opportunity to get into a proper studio came about by a most unusual circumstance. One night, after performing a club date, he ran into a local musician with a label deal who was recording at Montreal’s Bobinason Studios.

“He was looking for a songwriter,” Nova says. “I told him I wrote, and we started working together.”

When the guy skipped out of the sessions that had been booked, Nova got his big break.

“The people at the studio said I could use his time and do whatever I wanted.”

Nova had never recorded a proper demo of “Fantasy,” but as the lucky recipient of a large chunk of free studio time, he operated as his own one-man band.

“I played everything except the drums,” he says. “We tried a couple of drummers, but this guy Terry Martel nailed it.”

For guitar tracks, Nova used his favorite Wine Red Les Paul Custom.

“I cut the solo on the fly, but I had a plan for it,” he says. “I wanted it to sound like dueling guitars, like those southern rock bands used to do, so I double-tracked the solo with one on the left and the other on the right.”

Nova was displeased with the third album and the record company's insistence on making a more commercial album.[1] After supporting the Twitch album, Nova's label refused to release him from his contract, and he stopped working with Portrait. In 1990, Aldo Nova wrote the main guitar riff used in the Jon Bon Jovi song, "Blaze of Glory". In 1991, to return the favour, Bon Jovi worked with Nova to release Blood on the Bricks on Bon Jovi's label Jambco Records.

Nova produced some early Celine Dion albums. He co-wrote the hit song, "A New Day Has Come" for Dion, and has been featured playing guitar, synthesizer, and percussion on her records. He also wrote her songs "Your Light", "I Can't Fight the Feelin'", and "You and I" (which was used as Hillary Clinton's campaign song and as the Air Canada theme song). He co-wrote the Blue Öyster Cult song "Take Me Away" and was a member of the Guitar Orchestra of the State Of Imaginos on their album Imaginos.