Word: soule
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...House That Jack Built" and "Say A Little Prayer." Aretha is honest, she sings it the way she feels it. Her sales should have encouraged all involved to believe her best course would be to continue to deal in her own way. Not so. On her latest album, "Soul '69," she is often, though not always, cramped and weakened by large and superfluous brass and string sections, not to mention a number of poorly conceived arrangements. Essentially, this seems an attempt to emulate the breadth and polish of the Motown Sound. As such, it is neither a notable success...
...Space" is a song about being spaced-out. It starts slowly, as a stoned-steady guitar beat reverberating through an echo chamber accompanies the cool voices that weave in and out. "My body is walking in space/ My soul is in orbit with God, face to face," the eerie voices tell us, and we can believe in their moonglow-bathed hallucinations. But no sooner is the mood established, than composer Galt Mac Dermot and lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado destroy it by tipping their hats to the Times Square crowd. All of a sudden the chorus hippies are yelling...
...lyrics (except those from Shakespeare) are sufficiently self-conscious to be repulsive. The title song actually advises us to Do your own thing/ Find you own dream/ Dig your own soul/ Or dig your own hole and die." This is nothing compared to "The Middle Years," a paean to middle-age that is a trifle too reminiscent of Birdie's "Kids" and The Girl Who Came to Supper's (a 1963 flop) "How do Do do, Middle Age." If nothing else, Your Own Thing shows exactly how big a sell-out Hair could have been...
...large collection of songs before Promises--such as "Reach Out for Me," "What the World Needs Now is Love," "The Look of Love," "I Say a Little Prayer,"' "Message to Michael"--most of which were initially sung by Dionne Warwick. These compositions owe something to rock, something to soul and something to Gilbrerto. But it is rock without the acid, soul without the traditional soul beat and orchestrations, Gilberto without the relaxing rhythms...
...rock tendencies and electronic shaping, it is the emotional realism--the soul--of the Bacharach-David songs that makes them important to the future of commercial music, Broadway and elsewhere...