It’s seemingly unusual that 1978’s O Zambezi is such a roundly sunny record. In 1977, guitarist Robert Taylor and chief songwriter/keyboardist Paul Hewson were in a horrific car accident. Hewson’s injuries were so severe he turned to heroin to help manage the pain—the same drug that had claimed the life of drummer Neil Storey in 1976, and would later claim Hewson’s in 1985. Rather than grind to a hopeless halt, these calamities sent Dragon into what bassist Todd Hunter described as an “automatic shock mode” that prompted the band to keep busy making music to work through their ongoing upset—in much the same way they had for the decidedly dark Running Free. With this in mind, the joyous explosions of movement that typify “Politics,” “Company,” and enduring first single “Are You Old Enough?” make a certain kind of therapeutic sense. “Zambezi” translates to “water of God” in African Bantu. It’s arguably the only cryptic allusion to the tragedies that prefaced O Zambezi’s otherwise upwardly mobile 10 tracks—referring either to copious amount of whiskey-as-cope (“whiskey” itself translates to “water of life” from the original Gaelic), and/or the strong amniotic relationship that allowed Dragon to write something as classically romantic as the second single “Still In Love With You” during a time of crippling misfortune.