Cinderella — Coming Home

JUL 01 1989 · 12:00

Cinderella — Coming Home (1989) Director: Chris Painter & Marc Reshovsky Era: Late Hair Metal / Blues-Rock Transition Era (1988–1989) - The twilight of MTV-era glam metal, marked by power ballad dominance, major-label album cycles on Mercury Records, and a deliberate stylistic pivot toward blues-rock authenticity. High curatorial value as a transitional artifact capturing Cinderella at the precise moment of their stylistic pivot from glam metal spectacle to blues-influenced rock. The video's co-direction by Painter and Reshovsky — a team whose combined credits span Queensrÿche, Poison, Prince, and Billy Joel — makes it a significant node in the late-80s music video industrial network. Its appearance on MTV's Top 100 Videos of 1989 list and its inclusion in the 2005 'Greatest Video Hits' compilation confirm its canonical status within the band's legacy. Context: Released as the third single from 'Long Cold Winter' (Mercury Records, July 1988), 'Coming Home' arrived at a cultural inflection point where hair metal's dominance on MTV was beginning to be contested by an emerging blues-rock authenticity movement. The song peaked at #20 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and the video received MTV rotation in early 1989. Cinderella frontman Tom Keifer consciously steered the album toward organic instrumentation — 12-string guitars, pianos, acoustics — in a bid to align the band with classic Stones and Aerosmith blues-rock lineage. The video's imagery of motorcycle road travel and an empty, candlelit bar reinforced this repositioning away from the flashy excess of peak glam metal toward a grittier, working-class Americana aesthetic consistent with the band's Philadelphia roots. Director notes: The video was co-directed by Chris Painter and Marc Reshovsky, the same directing partnership credited on the Queensrÿche 'Video Mindcrime' (1989) long-form project. Per IMDB (tt8545248), the video was produced for Mercury Records as part of the 'Long Cold Winter' album cycle. The narrative structure — a lone man riding a motorcycle toward home intercut with the band performing in an empty, backlit bar at night — directly visualizes the song's themes of road exhaustion and longing for home. The video was later compiled into the Cinderella anthology release 'Rocked, Wired & Bluesed - The Greatest Video Hits' (2005). IMVDb lists the video's release year as 1988, while IMDB and the Music Video Wiki list it as 1989, consistent with the single's physical release date of April 1989 on Mercury (catalog 872982).