I wanted to bring Chuck out of recording retirement. For CSNY I wanted one album of new material done with minimal instrumentation to showcase the harmonies. For Melanie I wanted a simple low key recording that shows off her quiet voice as much as her powerhouse vocals.
While I can't do much about the first two, Melanie did record an album that was produced in a way that I would have done. Unfortunately, that album is as much of a mess as her later discography is. It is a mix of new songs, covers and remakes of old songs. Fortunately, there are 29 songs from the sessions. Plenty to pick and choose from to make one great album.
[If Melanie wanted to release a special vinyl issue for record store day this construction would get my top vote.]
Side One
01 The Natural Man
02 Freedom Knows My Name
03 If I Needed You
04 Taking A Bath
05 Count The Days You're Gone
06 Life Will Not Go Away
Side Two
01 Live Coal
02 Arrow (Cheryle Wheele)
03 Ballerina
04 Tonight's The Kind Of Night
05 Friends and Company
Reality Notes
Melanie is at the top of my guilty pleasure list (though I don't feel too guilty). My biggest issues with Melanie has always been on the production side. More often than not her albums are heavy with strings and other MOR nonsense. I like things simple and clean. Which is why I tend to gravitate to her live albums which are usually just her and maybe one or two other instrumentalists.
My other issue with Melanie comes from her later years. Simply put, Melanie's later discography is a mess. It started with the double album Ballroom Streets which had a few new songs and a lot of remakes. In later years she got into the habit of rerecording her early songs. While I have no real qualms about this practice, many artists revisit old material from time to time, in Melanie's case she often sacrificed space on albums that could have benefited from one or two new songs in order to include the remakes. As a result, we have enough alternate versions of songs to fill at least two albums.
Which brings us to Silver Anniversary. Recorded in the early 90s and released only in Germany and the Netherlands in double CD packages, each with slightly different tracklists. To confuse matters further, six songs were tacked on to the US version of the European only release Silence is King renamed Freedom Knows My Name after one of the songs from Silver Anniversary.
So what good can be found here? The new songs are all great songs. The remakes are good and some even rival the originals. The covers are imaginative even if they don't all live up to expectations. But most of all is the production. Primarily acoustic with sparse instrumentation, no strings or orchestras and almost no drums and some great background vocals. Just great songs. Of the 29 songs, ten originals and four covers make their first appearance on this album. Some of these were rerecorded for later albums but these are the original versions according to timeline. I wanted to include only those songs that make their first appearance on this album.
Because we have ten originals that time out to just over 36 minutes I only needed to include one of the new covers. Melanie's covers have always been hit and miss. Sometimes she manages to truly make the song her own, other times it just feels awkward. I could take two or three of the remaining new covers and pair them with three of the best remakes and have a fine EP but at the moment, I'm fine with this.
I did some light editing, cutting out excessive studio chatter and song title announcements. I left some lighthearted moments in but not enough to get in the way of the flow and overall enjoyment.
One song, Tonight's The Kind Of Night, which I named the album after, is actually a Christmas song that she later rerecorded for a full Christmas album. I could have dropped it and still have had a full album but this version is better than the remake and it's not an all out Christmas carol and only mentions Christmas during the chorus. It's more of a mood piece than a seasonal piece so I kept it in.
For the cover I used the picture from the Freedom Knows My Name album. Now about that discography, I think I may need to go and make some charts.
[Edit: I was just poking around Melanie's discography and noticed that Friends and Company previously appeared on Ballroom Streets and before that on Photograph so technically should not appear here. My view is that even though what we do here is revisionist in nature I feel once I have posted a project that is the final and definitive version. Also, given the timeline, this would not be the first Melanie album to have a remake on it. Plus, this is the better version. And I'm lazy. The purist can just delete that song from the folder. Thanks for listening. [Really? Same goes for If I Needed You. I need a break.]]
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