Anne Murray - Love Song (1974)

“Love Song” by Anne Murray (1974)

Release Date: February 1974
Produced by Brian Ahern
Genre: Country, Pop
Label: Capitol

Chart Positions: #5 (Canada), #24 (US)
Certifications: N/A

Singles: “Send A Little Love My Way” #25 (Canada), #72 (US), #10 (Canada Country), #6 (Canada Adult Contemporary), #79 (US Country), #10 (US Adult Contemporary), “A Love Song” #1 (Canada), #12 (US), #88 (Australia), #1 (Canada Country), #1 (Canada Adult Contemporary), #5 (US Country), #1 (US Adult Contemporary), “You Won’t See Me” #5 (Canada), #8 (US), #49 (Australia), #4 (Canada Adult Contemporary), #1 (US Adult Contemporary), “Just One Look” #11 (Canada), #86 (US), #50 (US Adult Contemporary)
Singles Certifications: N/A
Other Charting Tracks: “Son Of A Rotten Gambler” #1 (Canada Adult
Contemporary), #3 (Canada Country), #5 (US Country)

Best Tracks: “A Love Song,” “Just One Look,” “Real Emotion,” “You Won’t See Me,” “Son of a Rotten Gambler”

“Love Song” by Anne Murray (Click Here)

"Love Song" is the ninth studio album by Anne Murray issued in 1974 on Capitol Records. It peaked at #24 on the US Billboard Pop Albums chart and won a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and was nominated in the "Best Selling Album" category in the 1975 Juno Awards. Anne Murray’s rendition of the song "Send a Little Love My Way" was featured in the Stanley Cramer film, “Oklahoma Crude,” and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song in 1973.

A highlight from the album is the Lennon-McCartney Beatles tune “You Won’t See Me,” which went on to be a big hit for Murray reching #8 in the US and #5 in Canada. Lennon is said to have told Murray that her version of "You Won't See Me" was his favorite Beatles cover ever. Murray herself is a confessed Beatles fanatic and has covered several other Beatles songs, including "Day Tripper" and "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You".

“A Love Song” was written specifically by Kenny Loggins (and Donna Lyn George) for Anne Murray. The song was a major crossover hit for Murray. In her native Canada, it topped all three singles charts: the overall Top Singles chart, the Country Tracks chart and the Adult Contemporary chart. In the United States, the song peaked at No. 5 on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Singles chart and just missed the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 12. The song fared even better there in the adult contemporary market — it became Murray's third chart-topper on Billboard's American Hot Adult Contemporary Singles chart. This was the second time Anne charted with a Loggins & Messina song, having reached the Top 10 with her version of "Danny's Song" in 1973.

"A Love Song" (1974)

Anne was obviously a Kenny Loggins fan as she included a cover of the Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina penned "Watching The River Run" on this album. Murray's rendition is very similar to Loggins and Messina's with a homegrown feel to it.

Both "A Love Song" and "Watching The River Run" appeared on the Loggins and Messina album "Full Sail" which was released in October 1973.

The album's fourth single "Just One Look," a cover of Doris Troy's 1963 Top Ten was fairly popular in Canada but barely made a mark in the US. Though it's b-side "Son of a Rotten Gambler" gained quite a bit of traction on the country music charts in both the US and Canada. "Son of a Rotten Gambler" was written by Chip Taylor who is known for having written the mega-hit "Angel In The Morning" and the Troggs' 1966 classic "Wild Thing."

Murray gives us a great bluesy cover of Alan O’Day’s “Real Emotion.” We know Alan O’Day from his 1977 million selling chart topping hit “Undercover Angel” and Helen Reddy’s #1 hit in 1974 “Angie Baby,” which O’Day wrote. Anne Murray covered Alan O’Day’s “Caress Me Pretty Music” for her 1976 album “Keeping In Touch.”

In their review of this album Rolling Stone magazine commented, "if 1974 is to be the year for female pop, Anne Murray may prove to be it's most talented proponent.

Anne Murray (1974)

Link to “Love Song” (Click Here)

ANNE MURRAY

Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks (1975)

“Blood On The Tracks” by Bob Dylan (1975)

Release Date: January 17, 1975
Produced by Bob Dylan
Genre: Folk Rock, Classic Rock
Label: Columbia
Chart Positions: #1 (US, Canada, New Zealand), #2 (Norway), #4 (UK, Australia), #5 (Netherlands), #35 (Japan), #45 (Germany), #54 (Ireland)
Certifications: 2xPlatinum (US), Platinum (UK, Canada)

Singles: “Tangled Up In Blue” #31 (US)

Blood on the Tracks is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 20, 1975 by Columbia Records. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia Records after a two-album stint with Asylum Records. Dylan began recording the album in New York City in September 1974. In December, shortly before Columbia was due to release the record, Dylan abruptly re-recorded much of the material in a studio in Minneapolis. The final album contains five tracks from New York and five from Minneapolis.

“Blood On The Tracks” by Bob Dylan (Click Here)

In a 1975 radio discussion with Mary Travers, Bob Dylan stated that “Blood On The Tracks” was a personally painful work. He has claimed it was not autobiographical yet many of the songs seem to mirror what he was experiencing during the break-up of his marriage.

“Blood On The Tracks” is one of Dylan’s best selling albums having reached #1 in the US, Canada and New Zealand. The album reached #2 in Norway as well as #4 in the UK and Australia.

Initially, Dylan considered recording Blood on the Tracks with an electric backing group, and contacted Mike Bloomfield who had played lead guitar on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album. When the two met, Dylan ran through the songs he was planning to record, but he played them too quickly for Bloomfield to learn. In the end, Dylan rejected the idea of recording the album with a band, and instead substituted stripped-down acoustic arrangements for all of his songs.

Dylan had finished recording and mixing, and, by November, had cut a test pressing on the album. Columbia began to prepare to release the album before Christmas.

Dylan played the test pressing for his brother, David Zimmerman, who persuaded Dylan the album would not sell because the overall sound was too stark. Robert Christgau also heard the early version of the album and called it "a sellout to the memory of Dylan's pre-electric period". At his brother's urging, Dylan agreed to re-record five of the album's songs in Sound 80 in Minneapolis, with backing musicians recruited by David. The new takes were accomplished in two days at the end of December 1974. Blood on the Tracks was released into stores on January 20, 1975.

While recording the album Dylan kept a tiny notebook in which he worked out lyrics and other aspects of the songs that became the album "Blood On The Tracks." This notebook and others numbering up to around 6,000 pieces have been kept in a secret archive for several decades. He sold this archive for $20 million in 2016.

“Tangled Up In Blue,” the albums only single release, was a minor hit reaching #31 in the US but failed to chart anywhere else. The Telegraph has described the song as "The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing."

During the song Dylan sings "some are carpenter's wives," which was a reference to Laura Nyro. NYro had been part of the New York music scene in the late 1960s and was very much inspired by Dylan. You may remember some of the hits she wrote such as "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" (both hits for The Fifth Dimension), "And When I Die" (Blood Sweat and Tears, "Eli's Coming" (Three Dog Night) and "Stoney End" (Barbra Streisand).

The sixth verse, which begins: "I lived with them on Montague Street," is a direct reference to John Lennon. Lennon had moved into Ringo Starr's Montague Square apartment in 1968 (with Yoko) after Cynthia kicked him out.

Dylan wrote "Tangled Up In Blue" in the summer of 1974 at a farm he had just bought in Minnesota. He had been touring with The Band earlier that year. Dylan sometimes introduced this on stage by saying it took "10 years to live and 2 years to write." Dylan said he wrote this song after spending an entire weekend mesmerized by Joni Mitchell's album "Blue."

"Tangled Up In Blue"

Album highlight “Shelter From The Storm” has been covered by several musicians through the decades. Dylan got the title from a line in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop The Rain?": "I went down Virginia, seekin' shelter from the storm..."

In his April 1975 review for The New Republic J.T. Lhamon Jr writes, "The last verse of the last song on the album describes how the performer finds his highest art by attending to himself in order to attend to others: 'Life is sad, life is a bust / All you can do is what you must / You do what you must do and you do it well / I do it for you, ah honeybaby, can't you tell?' And that's it right there: that immediate consistent and thorough involvement with an audience both characterizes rock as the primary popular form of our time and determines it's promising esthetic."

Bob Dylan (1975)

Link to “Blood On The Tracks” (Click Here)

BOB DYLAN