Gather Me

Product Information

There's no discernible concept to this - it's hard to figure out what purpose is served by the quaint covers, 30-second fragments, half-finished works-in-progress and near-wordless guide vocals that cast a disproportionate shadow over the rest of the album.

The album also features the singles “Some Day I’ll Be a Farmer” and the Top 40 hit “Ring the Living Bell”.She enthused at the time that it was her best album yet (which should always be taken with a pinch of salt), and that it was the first album she was entirely happy with, and one that reflected exactly where her head was at, at the time! And it was that connection that motivated me to come out after the performance, meet everyone and never do a Melanie has left the building thing. 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. 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. As for the tracks, they are fun, light and gentle, but underneath, there are some serious messages she is trying to get across.

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! 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. I'm convinced it's a bit of a mickey-take - a metaphor has to make sense on one or both levels, but this can only be read (with difficulty) as, nothing more and nothing less than, a "hymn" to a night on the town. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.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. Steppin' has a country feeling with its harmonica and piano and is a somewhat regretful break-up song with a determination to move on. For this listener, the biggest problem with the album is a more mundane one - there's too much religious content. 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.

However, this is a great album beyond the popular "I've got a brand new pair of roller-skates" song, and the quality of the vinyl was excellent.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. It was such an unexpected surprise when I listened back to Brand New Key, Living Bell, Some Say, and I look at the girl I was. Non-personalized content and ads are influenced by things like the content you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location).

The latter is considered by many as one of her classics - to me it's a qualified success, because of the ambiguous lyric. My personal favorite is the melancholy Railroad, an intimate, confessional song with a nice arrangement of strings, guitar and winds. 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. I now see why you my dear ones are here it wasn’t just because you felt sorry for me (someone actually said that) or because I reminded you of something or someone you loved.Buddha was a relatively new label that had been spun off Kama Sutra Records (which had made it with the Lovin' Spoonful), when its distribution deal with MGM ended.