Andy Williams – Moon River And Other Great Movie Themes

I've been listening to a lot of rock lately, and every so often I'll dip deeper into my collection and clean out my ears a little with some good old-fashioned pop. Going back to 1962 and I wasn't even a tadpole ... but this album has so many songs that I remember as a kid. Considering the heyday of variety television when I was growing up, I probably saw him perform many of these songs.

It's hard to imagine what things were like in the early '60s. I'm scanning through Andy Williams' discography, and from what I can tell, Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes was his ninth studio album, and in 1962 he would release four albums, admittedly some were likely compilations. Still, that's a lot of wax, baby. This album would go gold and stay on the Billboard charts for an astonishing 176 weeks. Take that, Dark Side of the Moon!

I really like this album. The big song here is "Moon River," which was a new song at the time, and over the years the song would become synonymous with Andy Williams. The number of great themes here is kind of astonishing. The songs collected here were drawn from movies past and present ... of course, they're all past now.

Andy Williams was a singer's singer, and the richness of his tenor, his vocal range, and a full falsetto that didn't sound thin and anemic were something to behold. His vibrato was so natural it was almost hypnotic. With the passing of the years, his accomplishments seem to have been relegated to nostalgia, but there was a time when Andy Williams was one of the biggest recording stars in the world.

The songs may tend to sound dated now, but the arrangements and strings provided by Robert Mersey (who was also an integral part of Andy's Christmas album) are perfectly suited to the music. This was still the age of the mono recording, and I got lucky when I found the stereo version.

In 1962, I'm not sure what the studio setup was, but in my mind's eye I can imagine the orchestra in the big room, picked up by an overhead boom, with Andy in an isolation booth, and they're cutting live from the floor. There are a couple of vocal pops that caught me by surprise (particularly on "Moon River") and only added to the perception that what I was listening to was a captured performance.

This was a fun find, and while I knew a few of the songs, "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" and "Moon River" coming into the album, I was surprised at how many songs I actually knew. This was a trip of sorts down memory lane, but the memories were memories of memories. Before my time, but still songs I remembered.

Comments

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog