YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – It’s been a while since 38 Special has had a hit, but its latest single, “All I Haven’t Said,” has the jangly guitars and emotional pull that put the band all over the airwaves in its early years.
The song comes from the 2025 album “Milestone,” which delivered the band’s first batch of new songs in over two decades and celebrated its 50th anniversary.
38 Special will continue the party when it comes to Powers Auditorium in Youngstown on Oct. 1 for a 7:30 p.m. concert. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster and at the DeYor Performing Arts Centre box office.
38 Special is still led by frontman Don Barnes, who co-founded the act in 1974 with his Jacksonville, Fla., pal Donnie Van Zant.
Van Zant, who no longer performs, is the brother of the late Ronnie Van Zant, original singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
One of the top acts of the 1980s, 38 Special was all over rock radio with “Hold On Loosely,” “Caught Up In You,” “If I’d Been the One,” “Back Where You Belong” and “Second Chance.”
In a phone interview from his Atlanta home, Barnes said he got some help writing his current single, “All I Haven’t Said,” from an unlikely source – his wife, Christine.
“I would have never come up with that title,” he said. “My wife did. She was in the kitchen, and I was noodling around with some chords on an acoustic guitar. She came around the corner and said, ‘Is that something you’re working on?’ and I said ‘Nah, I’m just noodling around. And she says, ‘It sounds like it should be called ‘All I Haven’t Said.’ So I said, let’s write it. She sat down, and we wrote the chorus and several lines of lyrics.”
The title was “perfect,” Barnes said, and summed up the lyrics before they were even written.
The words are those of a man who is finally telling his soulmate all the things he never said that reveal how much she means to him.
“I always try to put truth in songs,” Barnes said, “so people can relate to it and say, ‘Man, I feel just like that guy singing.’”
The song carries the emotional weight of a longtime couple who share a mature type of love. The wife feels that she isn’t being heard lately, and the husband is trying to become articulate enough to tell her how he feels.
Christine’s lyrical contributions earned her a songwriting credit for the song.
“I asked her, ‘What’s the ultimate thing a guy could say about how much she means to him?’ And she said, ‘I would write it across the sky how much I love you.’”
That line became part of the chorus and gave her a stake in the song.
“She asked, ‘Should I start my own publishing company?’ and I was like, slow down, baby,” Barnes said with a laugh.
“All I Haven’t Said” has topped 3 million streams, and its video has topped a half-million views. The song is also making inroads into the country music market.
“It’s kind of a throwback to the jangly guitars and the ’60s vocal harmonies from The Searchers and the British invasion stuff that I grew up with,” Barnes said. “I just put all that in there, the string and single drone note harmonies and the other things that worked for all those years. They’re starting to pick it up on country radio.”
He describes the song as a diamond. “It just says it all, and I think a lot of people, even in the country music market, have wanted to say those things to their spouse or significant other,” he said.
Barnes and his wife met about 14 years ago at the airport in Charlotte, N.C. He was waiting for his flight to be rescheduled when a woman took the only available seat, which was next to him.
“She was gorgeous, and I thought she might have been a model,” Barnes recalled. “She was moving to Cincinnati, and I asked, if I was to find myself in Cincinnati, how would I find you? She said call me and gave me her business card, which said Senior Vice President, Wealth Management. And I was like, wow, beauty and brains.”
Christine asked a stranger at the airport to snap a photo of her and Barnes so she could send it to her brother, who was a 38 Special fan.
She and Barnes would marry in 2013, and that photo has since become a keepsake for them.
Why all the details about this airport love story? Because it also found its way onto the new album. Barnes describes their introduction in the album’s final cut, a ballad called “The Look.”
“All of the songs on the album are rock, with some introspective ones mixed in,” Barnes said. “But the last song doesn’t fit in with the others. It tells about us meeting for the first time.”
The song also has that subtle quality that grows on the listener and shares a personal story that listeners could identify with.
Barnes hopes it will also find a wider audience, perhaps as part of a soundtrack.
“We’re trying to find a movie to put it in,” Barnes said. “Or maybe a commercial or a TV show.”