Bob Seger was one of the last major artists to put his music on streaming platforms, so it’s no huge surprise that he’s also one of the last to start an official YouTube channel. It premiered Friday with a lyric video for his 1976 classic “Night Moves.”
“The video is the first of a series of lyric videos Capitol is producing to highlight Seger’s classic hits,” reads a press release. “The Bob Seger Official Artist Channel will also premiere rare and classic Seger music videos restored for the first time in HD, and feature custom playlists of Seger’s catalog in HD quality audio, fan-generated videos, as well as rare and unreleased content.”
Seger already made a “Night Moves” video back in 1994 that featured Matt LeBlanc shortly before he became a superstar thanks to Friends. The video also showed 1994-era Seger lip-syncing to his original 1976 recording in which he recounted teenage events from 1962.
The “Night Moves” hall of mirrors is now even more surreal with this 2020 lyric video showing the lyrics and graphics related to the song. (Lyric videos are usually reserved for new songs prior to the release of a proper video, but they seem to be going this route since many of Seger’s most famous songs were created prior to the music video age.)
The music video was never Seger’s art form of choice, but he did create ones for “Like a Rock,” “The Fire Inside,” “Changes Are,” “Turn the Page” and “Wait for Me” that will presumably appear at some point on this new YouTube channel.
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The fate of his early albums still remains a complete mystery. In a move that has baffled and frustrated fans for years, he has kept them out of print for decades and they are extremely hard to find through any legal means. “Jack White is always asking me about that,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018. “He wants to remix them all, and said he’d do it for free. But I’m always on to the next thing — the next album, the next tour. Maybe when I retire I’ll get serious about it.”
Seger wrapped up his Roll Me Away: The Final Tour at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center on November 1st, 2019. He left the window open very slightly to perform more shows overseas since it was merely billed as his “Final North American Tour.” But outside of brief visits in 1977 and 1980, he’s never played outside of America and there’s no indication any such tour is in the works.
That gives him plenty of time now to get those early albums back out. In the meantime, however, enjoy the new “Night Moves” lyric video.