Gather Me

Product Information

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Non-personalized content and ads are influenced by things like the content you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location). To his credit, label head Neil Bogart promoted her relentlessly and also left her style be her own rather than trying to make her a bubblegum princess. The whole album presents a grown up Melanie with a interestingly wide range of material and the same intensity that marked her earlier albums and along with her sincerity was a defining characteristic. Buddah never did forgive Melanie for this and continued to dog her career by releasing old, in-the-can songs right around the time she'd release new songs on Neighborhood.

You could debate whether Candles In the Rain or Gather Me was Melanie's best album but I think fans would agree that they are together her best albums. When they signed Melanie they were high on Bubblegum Music, having struck gold in 1968 with groups like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. For this listener, the biggest problem with the album is a more mundane one - there's too much religious content. If Melanie has always been anxious not to be defined by her religious affiliation (which has changed over the years), and in later years has regarded herself as a secular humanist first and foremost, you'd never know it from listening to this! But then, the "God stuff" keeps cropping up where you least expect it - not only in the album's coda (a song which may date from the 1900s), but implicitly in "Some Say I Got Devil" and "Railroad", and explicitly in "Center of the Circle", the longest of those seemingly-unfinished songs which fortunately is rescued by arranger Roger Kellaway - who unexpectedly converts it into a wild flight of fancy, a chamber-pop tour-de-force.

The inside lists musicians and the production crew and that's it except for the track listing on the back. She enthused at the time that it was her best album yet (which should always be taken with a pinch of salt), and that it was the first album she was entirely happy with, and one that reflected exactly where her head was at, at the time! There's no discernible concept to this - it's hard to figure out what purpose is served by the quaint covers, 30-second fragments, half-finished works-in-progress and near-wordless guide vocals that cast a disproportionate shadow over the rest of the album. I now see why you my dear ones are here it wasn’t just because you felt sorry for me (someone actually said that) or because I reminded you of something or someone you loved. I have a very well-worn vinyl copy of this album, and I have a feeling I’ll be spinning the digital version just as much.

It was such an unexpected surprise when I listened back to Brand New Key, Living Bell, Some Say, and I look at the girl I was. Steppin' has a country feeling with its harmonica and piano and is a somewhat regretful break-up song with a determination to move on.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. My Favorite album from Melanie's stint with Buddha Records, All great songs, with a lot of complex arrangements.

The latter is considered by many as one of her classics - to me it's a qualified success, because of the ambiguous lyric. Allmusic stated that the album "is one of her most accomplished and confident albums, a set that allowed Melanie the room to indulge her lyrical obsessions while Schekeryk created superb musical accompaniment from her simple but forceful melodies. Buddha was a relatively new label that had been spun off Kama Sutra Records (which had made it with the Lovin' Spoonful), when its distribution deal with MGM ended. Ring the Living Bell is arranged in a roots music fashion with an opening that sounds like it could have been recorded by a raw group in the Appalachian Mountains, before it shifts into more of a pop vein. It opens with Little Bit of Me a sincere explanation of why she can't be constantly touring and recording.Brand New Key had even been banned by some radio stations because its lyrics could be read as something less innocent than the song sounded when Melanie recorded it in the little girl voice she sometimes used. After I finish recording, I never listened back maybe if I had I might’ve known but I was on to the next thing I was working on.