Gather Me

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The inside lists musicians and the production crew and that's it except for the track listing on the back. Ring the Living Bell is arranged in a roots music fashion with an opening that sounds like it could have been recorded by a raw group in the Appalachian Mountains, before it shifts into more of a pop vein.

But then, the "God stuff" keeps cropping up where you least expect it - not only in the album's coda (a song which may date from the 1900s), but implicitly in "Some Say I Got Devil" and "Railroad", and explicitly in "Center of the Circle", the longest of those seemingly-unfinished songs which fortunately is rescued by arranger Roger Kellaway - who unexpectedly converts it into a wild flight of fancy, a chamber-pop tour-de-force. You could debate whether Candles In the Rain or Gather Me was Melanie's best album but I think fans would agree that they are together her best albums. My personal favorite is the melancholy Railroad, an intimate, confessional song with a nice arrangement of strings, guitar and winds. The album also features the singles "Some Day I'll Be a Farmer" and the Top 40 hit "Ring the Living Bell".Though she would release six more albums through 1976, this would be her peak on the radio and record charts. It opens with Little Bit of Me a sincere explanation of why she can't be constantly touring and recording.

To his credit, label head Neil Bogart promoted her relentlessly and also left her style be her own rather than trying to make her a bubblegum princess. Brand New Key had even been banned by some radio stations because its lyrics could be read as something less innocent than the song sounded when Melanie recorded it in the little girl voice she sometimes used. I have a very well-worn vinyl copy of this album, and I have a feeling I’ll be spinning the digital version just as much. Some of her classics can be found on this as well, from “Ring the Living Bell” to “Some Say (I Got Devil), to name but 2 of the best of her work.Some Day (I Got Devil) has the Spanish guitar intonations and sound as well as the same passion found in her song Tuning My Guitar, from the Melanie LP. The Southern Appalachian folk-hymn What Wondrous Love is given an appropriately simple treatment with mostly Melanie's voice and guitar. The arrangements are mostly quiet and acoustic and even when strings are added they're not overwhelming. When they signed Melanie they were high on Bubblegum Music, having struck gold in 1968 with groups like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. Gather Me was Melanie's first album on the Neighborhood label which was founded by herself with her husband and manager Peter Schekeryk (to whom she stayed married until his death in 2010).

Buddah never did forgive Melanie for this and continued to dog her career by releasing old, in-the-can songs right around the time she'd release new songs on Neighborhood. The whole album presents a grown up Melanie with a interestingly wide range of material and the same intensity that marked her earlier albums and along with her sincerity was a defining characteristic. Center of the circle is the big production number of the album, but even there the arrangement, which includes a small orchestra, doesn't overwhelm.After I finish recording, I never listened back maybe if I had I might’ve known but I was on to the next thing I was working on. If Melanie has always been anxious not to be defined by her religious affiliation (which has changed over the years), and in later years has regarded herself as a secular humanist first and foremost, you'd never know it from listening to this! The latter is considered by many as one of her classics - to me it's a qualified success, because of the ambiguous lyric.

For this listener, the biggest problem with the album is a more mundane one - there's too much religious content. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The only negative being the lyrics with Melanie at times, explaining what a great person she is, which can be a little irritating.Allmusic stated that the album "is one of her most accomplished and confident albums, a set that allowed Melanie the room to indulge her lyrical obsessions while Schekeryk created superb musical accompaniment from her simple but forceful melodies. My Favorite album from Melanie's stint with Buddha Records, All great songs, with a lot of complex arrangements. As for the tracks, they are fun, light and gentle, but underneath, there are some serious messages she is trying to get across. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Steppin'", which also sounds today like a pre-echo of Orton, and incidentally was the first "wronged-woman song" in her catalogue (if you overlook "Wait By the Water" and, indeed, "You Can Go Fishin'").