My Own Biggest Fan

The first Brenda Lee album I bought was …”Let Me Sing”. (Yes, the ellipsis and quotation marks are all part of the title.) I love that album. It’s great for drinking a bottle of wine to and considering your life too. And because I loved it I decided to grab a couple more the next time I was at the record store. The result was a good example of why sometimes a little bit of research is a good idea before snapping up records willy nilly.

You see, Let Me Sing is the last album that Brenda Lee recorded that charted in the Top 40 (at #39). That’s not to say that albums that don’t chart aren’t worth anything, but it seems that anything after that album, recorded at the end of 1963, sounds a little uninspired. Coming on Strong, recorded in 1966, bears little resemblance to the awesomeness that is Let Me Sing. Not that it’s entirely awful. The title track of Coming On Strong was her last hit before reinventing herself as a country artist. (Yes, it’s the song Golden Earring sings about playing on the radio in Radar Love.) It’s just that it’s offset by some truly lame material. For example, on that album is one of the least energetic and unfunky versions of Stevie Wonder’s Uptight I’ve ever been privileged to listen to.

Johnny One Time, I feel, is a better album than Coming On Strong. Maybe it’s because it has If You Go Away on it, a song I enjoy to hear sang by pretty much anyone. It feels a little more vibrant than Coming On Strong. This could be because it seems that Brenda took a little bit of a recording hiatus, having not released anything for a year and a half beforehand. That doesn’t seem like much of a rest, but not if you take into account she was releasing two albums a year from 1960 to 1966, that’s huge.

The point of all this is that I guess I need to be smarter with my impulse record purchases. Even when I’m buying an artist I know I like, who has a giant back catalogue to choose from, you can’t always expect gold.