Air Supply's rhythmic harmony comes through in every song

After 35 years of harmonizing, the musical relationship shared by Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock, known collectively as Air Supply, is instinctual.

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Air Supply performs Friday with Symphony Orchestra Augusta.

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The duo met and began performing together while in an Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar. They have built a career crafting lilting love songs out of, by Russell's admission, very little at all.

"We're not really trained musicians," he said in a recent phone interview promoting the band's appearance Friday with Symphony Orchestra Augusta. "We didn't go down a normal path. We do rely, quite completely, on intuition."

Russell said that over the years he has become a fairly proficient rhythm player on guitar and piano, but that the magic of Air Supply has always been the lyrical content and the way he and Hitchcock present them.

"It's vital to us," he said. "It's really where we begin. We both learned, years and years ago, that you have to start with a great song. When I first played Lost in Love to Russell, he had traveled 700 miles -- by bus. We had no money -- nothing. But he said it was a hit. That's the sort of innocence we have always tried to maintain."

Russell noted that Lost in Love has only four chords. He said writing in that style has always allowed the duo a measure of freedom. They can perform songs very simply as a duo with acoustic guitar, or, as with the Augusta date, with an orchestra.

"We're lucky that way," he said. "The truth is, we don't do a lot of these, a lot of symphony shows. So when we do hear that, hear those arrangements, it is thrilling for us. We get goosebumps."

Still, he said, as complex as the arrangements might get, the arrangement he has with his musical partner remains the same as it did in 1975. The secret of a lasting musical marriage, he said, is chemistry.

"That's everything to us," he said. "Absolutely everything."