Olivia Newton-John seemed to slip silently through the back door when she released her debut album If Not For You<\/i> in 1971. Hailing all the way across the globe from Australia, it must have seemed like a daunting task to launch a country pop career in America at the time. You simply couldn\u2019t predict how it would build and build to the point where she ultimately became an international singing sensation. Slow and steady progress proved to be the winning formula, owed in great part to her long-time producer and songwriter John Farrar. This first album was the template that helped to introduce this pleasant, understated voice to the masses. With the help of co-producer Bruce Welch, it was all about song selection here. There would be no original material coming out of these sessions, though the covers would be arranged in the best possible way to showcase Olivia\u2019s singing ability.<\/p>\n
The listening public in the early \u201870s seemed to favor the familiar. Today, cover tunes are recorded sparingly, if at all. Annie Lennox\u2019s Medusa<\/i>, Erasure\u2019s Other People\u2019s Songs<\/i> and the worst offender of all, Duran Duran\u2019s Thank You<\/i> immediately come to mind. Fellow \u201870s AC stalwarts Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart and Donny Osmond all resuscitated their own careers with salutes to yesteryear. It can be done, but still, it does feel like a stopgap or stall tactic. In my humble opinion, the past should stay in the past. Why tamper with memories or try to reinvent the wheel?<\/p>\n
It does help if, like me, you\u2019ve never heard the original versions before. I may get a lot of flak for this, but when the Bee Gees\/Peter Frampton musical of Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/i> first came out, I didn\u2019t even know who the Beatles were! I know it\u2019s not the best way to start out as a burgeoning music critic, but there you have it. The same goes for nearly all the previously recorded songs on Olivia Newton-John\u2019s early albums such as this. Her stuff was all new to me, woe be to all the rock purists out there! Hey, Bob Dylan may have written and recorded the pristine title track first, but the single never even charted. Olivia\u2019s version did. As her first single, it cracked the Billboard<\/i> Top 25. So there.<\/p>\n
Also to be found on this first ONJ offering are popular hits by Kris Kristofferson (\u201cHelp Me Make It Through The Night\u201d), Gordon Lightfoot (\u201cIf You Could Read My Mind\u201d) and Bread\u2019s \u201cIf,\u201d one of the few originals here I wish hadn\u2019t <\/i>been re-recorded. Olivia just couldn\u2019t capture the same kind of high emotion that David Gates did. That is my major quibble with Olivia\u2019s vocal performances on her debut effort; all of the songs tend to blur together in a hazy, singular note. Granted, she was never a belter, though she would try her damnedest on 1978\u2019s Totally Hot<\/i>, when she transformed in front of our very eyes and ears from country princess to bad girl Sandy from Grease<\/i> in the course of one album. Her career zenith came a few years later with the creative high point of Physical<\/i>, basically blowing her \u201870s good girl image to smithereens in the process. Okay, maybe in retrospect, it wasn\u2019t that<\/i> bad. Only Utah seemed to think so.<\/p>\n
The two cuts that jump out from the rest on If Not For You<\/i> are \u201cLove Song\u201d and \u201cLullaby.\u201d They manage to hook the listener\u2019s attention with a state of suspense that makes you want to know more about Olivia herself and hear what she might come up with next. Olivia had the whole package: the beauty, the sweet voice and the potential to do so much more. For her sophomore release, Olivia<\/i>, she would even dare to write her first song (the brilliant \u201cChanges\u201d). If you had the patience to track Olivia\u2019s snail-pace career progress like I did, your intrigue as a fan would pay dividends. As her closing song says, \u201cNo Regrets.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":31813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8092],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-43531","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-olivia-newton-john","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43531"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}