Love Songs [Sound Solutions]

Performer: Roy Orbison
Engineer: Tom Ruff
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: With his geeky, black-rimmed glasses and pasty, pudgy-faced visage, Roy Orbison was never exactly heartthrob material. Nevertheless, his poetic lyrics, quavering tenor, and impassioned vocal delivery made him one of the most romantic singers in pop history. The Orbison addition to Columbia's LOVE SONGS series is an excellent cross-section of the enigmatic performer's aesthetic, capturing the dreamy, yearning essence of his music perfectly. From the opener, "Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)," the listener is struck by the singer's ability to blend rich melodies, string-sweetened arrangements, and pop hooks in a powerfully effective way. This distinctive style carries through on the building drama of "Running Scared," the misty-eyed fantasy of "Blue Bayou," and the definitive relationship curtain call, "It's Over." Each gem here achieves the dimensions of a mini-epic (particularly the surreal, aching masterpiece "In Dreams") via swelling strings, backing vocals, and escalating dynamics. Through it all is Orbison's superb, reverb-touched voice that virtually drips with love, heartbreak, loneliness, and longing. Orbison's vocals and music are so closely connected to the more tender emotions, if fact, that this well-selected LOVE SONGS--save a couple important omissions (namely "Pretty Woman" and "Crying")--plays like a greatest-hits collection.

Roy Orbison, a seminal rock & roll singer who initially recorded for the legendary Sun Records, created some of the most enduring hits of the 1950s and '60s. His near-operatic voice and dark, broken-hearted songs influenced a generation of artists. His songs and arrangements, almost symphonic in scope, set the template for pop sophistication in the early-to-mid-'60s. After a late-'80s comeback that included collaborations with Bono and Elvis Costello and a stint with the rock super-group the Travelling Wilburys, Orbison died of a heart attack in 1988.

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