Billy Squier has released his first rock song since 1993's Tell the Truth album. Harder On A Woman was premiered during an interview with broadcaster Eddie Trunk on his Sirius XM show Trunk Nation.
Harder On A Woman arrives less than a week after Squier posted a teaser video entitled Rock returns to Planet Earth... on his YouTube channel, and almost four decades after the release of the controversial video for Rock Me Tonite, which many blame for derailing Squier's career.
"The video had a deleterious effect on my career," Squier told the authors of I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution in 2011. "The tour before, I was selling out arenas faster than Sinatra, and as soon as that video came out, I was playing to half houses.
"The video misrepresents who I am as an artist. I was a good-looking, sexy guy. That certainly didn't hurt in selling records. But in this video, I'm sort of pretty boy. And I'm preening around a room. People said, 'He's gay.' Or 'He's on drugs.' It was traumatising to me. I mean, I had nothing against gays. I have a lot of gay friends. But like it or not, it was more of a sticky point then."
Tell the Truth sold less than 40,000 copies, just 12 years after the release of 1981's Don't Say No, which turned Squier into a major star and sold more than three million. His last album was 1998's Happy Blue, an album of acoustic blues.
