REMINISCING
1. Raining In My Heart
2. Early In The Morning
3. Fool's Paradise
4. Think It Over
5. Love's Made A Fool Of You
6. Well Alright
7. Come Back Baby
8. That's My Desire
9. It Doesn't Matter Anymore
10. Heartbeat
11. Now We're One
12. Reminiscing
13. It's So Easy
14. Take Your Time
15. Wishing
16. Lonesome Tears
17. Moondreams
18. True Love Ways
_________________________________________________________________________
By the time his warm corpse lay motionless on a snowy Iowan cornfield in the dark early hours of February 3, 1959 (after being thrown out of the airplane he was inside as it smashed into the frozen dirt), 22-year-old singer-songwriter Buddy Holly had three studio albums under his belt and on record store shelves. However, over a year had elapsed since recording had wrapped on the most recent of these LPs, and he had been developing musically by leaps and bounds over the course of what ended up being his final year with the living. From January through October he had been putting new songs to tape on a regular basis, and from this batch of material had been drawn five new singles and an extra B-side. These tracks are some of the most musically adventurous of his entire career, and are among a total of 18 songs that he had completed by the time his plane took off from the runway. Whereas all of his previous albums were only 25 minutes long (being 11 to 12 songs apiece), this batch comes in closer to 40. Reminiscing is intended to serve as the follow-up to his self-titled classic Buddy Holly, as well as to mop up all of the finished tracks from this era of his career. However, it's not the last Buddy Holly record I'll be posting, and is not even the final one he recorded, chronologically speaking, although it is the final one to be recorded in the studio.
So, what happened to all these songs after he left the material world? Not so much as a month had gone by before his first compilation, The Buddy Holly Story, hit the charts to, it must be noted, widespread acclaim. It contained no new material, but six of those songs from the singles were slotted in next to earlier hits; indeed, the LP opens with the exact same two songs as Reminiscing does here. By the 1960s though, things got a lot more questionable, and the quality began to drop off considerably. Several different producers came in and started overdubbing new instruments onto these (already-finished) songs as well as various demos (this was completely needless, to my ears, but especially when it comes to the former). The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2 (1960) contained the first of these creations, alongside a few more finished-but-unreleased studio recordings. A few years later came another LP, this one called Reminiscing. It has the best cover art of all these posthumous records by a long shot, which, along with the fact that I included the title track in my album, was my reason for taking its artwork and title for my own project. The official one, however, is made up of that title track and a bunch more overdubbed demos. A pretty similar ratio of material was maintained on the other three albums of new material that followed: 1964's Showcase, 1965's Holly In The Hills, and 1969's Giant. My intention is to more or less replace all these disjointed compilations with strong albums featuring nothing recorded after he died (as, while I'm not against posthumous overdubs universally, I do believe they should only be done if actually necessary in the first place). I might skip over some of the demos from really early in his career that got included on these LPs, though. Stay tuned to see, I guess!
Buddy Holly (1958)
Anyhow, it took a surprising number of years for me to nail the song flow on this thing, but now that I have, I'm very happy to post it. I'll make a few final notes before closing off. The first track to be recorded was "That's My Desire," if I'm not mistaken, and it was recorded immediately following (during the same session as) "Rave On," which was the last track recorded for his self-titled record from 1958 (pictured above, and released in February, curiously). That's just an interesting little tidbit which links these two albums together. Also, the four songs where Holly is backed by an orchestra are featured here in mono mixes, just like everything else on the album, but were actually recorded to three-track tape, making them his only stereo recordings ever. I decided to stick with the mono ones for cohesion purposes, but the stereo mixes can be found on a large variety of other releases. They were mixed after he died, however. Oh, also the two sides of (imaginary) vinyl are exactly the same length, which I'm pretty happy about. All songs are sourced from the Not Fade Away box set that was released in 2009. Well alright, that's it from me! I hope you enjoy this album as much as I do: happy listening, everybody!
No comments:
Post a Comment