|
|
|
|
| |
Babyface - Playlist
| Calendarlive | James Blunt AS oxymorons go, "soft rock" wields more power than most people admit. Largely dismissed as a watered-down, blown-dry corruption of liberated youth culture, it's been shoved into the category of "guilty pleasure" practically since its inception.
As early as 1971, the great critic Lester Bangs declared war on it in a rant titled "James Taylor Marked for Death," which included the writer's fantasy of forever squelching the "adenoidal poesy" of said sensitive singer-songwriter by clocking him with a bottle of Ripple....full text |
| | Ew | | Like R&B vocalists from Stevie Wonder to Al Green, Kenny ''Babyface'' Edmonds can take bland or treacly material — here, for example, James Taylor's ''Fire and Rain'' — and render it superior to the original with delicate or atypical phrasing plus sheer commitment. Passion, not laid-backness, rules on Playlist, a set of originals and covers. Sometimes Babyface's take is equal to the singer's (Bob Dylan's ''Knockin' on Heaven's Door''). Less successful: the fussy arrangements on cringers like Jim Croce's ''Time in a Bottle....full text |
| | Allmusic | | Covers albums tend to be dashed off as a way to fulfill an artist's last remaining contractual obligation to his or her label. However, Playlist is Babyface's first release for Mercury, following 2005's Grown & Sexy, and he put a lot of heart and soul into the material, all of which connected with him as a youngster listening to '70s AM radio. Most of the sources are anything but cool: James Taylor, Jim Croce, Dan Fogelberg, Dave Loggins, and Bread. (Then again, Bread were sort of like the Coldplay of their day.)...full text |
|
Babyface lyrics |
|