MR. BIG TRIVIA
Trivia
The band had intended their July 2023 shows to be the last time they played Japan. What brought them back in February 2025 was the volume of requests for a final Japanese date as the year-long world tour came to an end — from the promoter, from fans, and from what was being posted online.
Alongside the final Japanese shows of February 2025, the band announced that support for recovery from the Noto Peninsula earthquake would run with them, in the form of a charity programme and an auction.
What the band's own site currently presents as new music is a thirtieth-anniversary edition of 1996's Hey Man, issued in audiophile formats: a hybrid multi-channel SACD and a double MQA-CD.
To Be With You has a co-writer alongside Eric Martin: David Grahame, who had played Paul McCartney in the stage show Beatlemania. The demo was folk-leaning, and it was Grahame who suggested stripping the instrumentation right back, along the lines of the Beatles' Give Peace A Chance.
What plays on To Be With You, the song that took them to number one in America, is a bass drum, an acoustic guitar and hand claps. The biggest hit by a band known for its technique uses almost none of it. It sits last on the album, too.
The first single from Lean Into It was not To Be With You but Green-Tinted Sixties Mind. Radio had already started playing To Be With You straight off the album before it was issued as a single of its own. The one that followed it, Just Take My Heart, reached number 16 in America.
Making Ten, their last studio album, included a pre-production stage they had not had before. In November 2023 Eric Martin took an Airbnb near Paul Gilbert's house, and the two of them wrote the songs and made the demos together. Martin has said he enjoyed it as much as making the first and second albums.
In 2019, a little over a year after Pat Torpey's death, Billy Sheehan set out his position: he did not want to be in a band that loses a member and carries on with a replacement, because what the original members would be left with, on that path, is a logo. He did not rule out a final tour.
By the contacts the official site lists, the band's label is Evolution Music Group, management is UEG and booking is handled by TKO.
Nancy Bennett directed the videos for both To Be With You and Just Take My Heart. She made most of Mr. Big's videos from that period.
Just Take My Heart was written by Eric Martin with Andre Pessis, and was the single put out to follow To Be With You.
Ten is their tenth studio album and their first in seven years. It came out on 12 July 2024.
On earlier tours Paul Gilbert spent the travelling hours listening to music on headphones while Eric Martin sat with the others on the bus. The two of them shutting themselves away in one place to write is something that happened for this last album.
The final Japanese shows were given a name of their own: The BIG Finale! Forever In Our Hearts. They were held on 22 February 2025 at Osaka-jo Hall and on 25 February at the Nippon Budokan.
The shows the band played after Pat Torpey's death were dates that had already been booked while he was alive. What they became, in the event, was a series of tributes to him.