Melissa Manchester

By the fall of 1979, Melissa Manchester was arguably on a roll. Her career had just simmered along for a few years after her breakthrough Top Ten hit "Midnight Blue" in 1975. But in the summer of 1978, Kenny Loggins took "Whenever I Call You Friend," a song he had written with Manchester, into the Top Five. Then, in the fall, she released her version of Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager's "Don't Cry Out Loud" and enjoyed her second Top Ten hit as a performer, with the album of the same name, her seventh, spending six months in the charts. A charting movie theme, "Through the Eyes of Love," from the summer 1979 film Ice Castles (later nominated for an Academy Award) kept the momentum going. Understandably, Arista Records expected a new LP for the fall, and although Manchester hadn't really had time to write an album's worth of strong new material, that didn't matter to the label; company president Clive Davis always fancied himself a great song picker, and he was ready with suggestions for outside songs Manchester could record. The result, eleven months after Don't Cry Out Loud, was her eighth album, generically called Melissa Manchester. That "we can't think of a title" title was the first indication that something was amiss. The second was the LP's leadoff track and advance single, Lisa Dal Bello's "Pretty Girls." Manchester had always had her biggest successes with romantic ballads, but "Pretty Girls" was an up-tempo number about -- a makeup-counter pedophile? So it seemed, anyway. Arista's promotional staff managed to muscle this singularly unsuitable piece of material into the Top 40, but it didn't make much of a calling card for the album, and by the time the label followed with a more characteristic ballad as the second single (Steve Dorff, Larry Herbstritt, and Gary Harju's "Fire in the Morning"), it was really too late. Struggling to number 63 in the Billboard album chart, Melissa Manchester returned the singer to her pre-"Don't Cry Out Loud" level of popularity. It was too bad, because the album could have done much better if it had been handled better. When the first actual Manchester composition, "It's All in the Sky Above," appeared at the end of side one (track five), it introduced a half-album that was very good. Manchester put her own spin on "Whenever I Call You Friend," taking the Loggins part while labelmate Paul Davis sang the Stevie Nicks part. It couldn't be released as a single, but it made a good album track. Unlike Don't Cry Out Loud, which had been produced by Motown veteran Leon Ware and had a disco-inflected R&B feel, Melissa Manchester was produced by Steve Buckingham, and he gave it a distinct pop/rock style. (After all, disco had died in the interim between records.) Buckingham liked to insert searing electric guitar solos by Larry Byrom when he could get away with it, such as in "Don't Want a Heartache" and "How Does It Feel Right Now." But he also respected Manchester's light, melodic feel and interest in keyboard-based arrangements, even letting her end the album alone at the piano on the moving "Lights of Dawn." If the singer/songwriter had taken, say, another six months to write a few more songs and not been forced to follow her record company's dictates, the album that was released as Melissa Manchester might have been not only stronger, but also more successful commercially. As it was, it was half-good. In 2007, Wounded Bird Records licensed the album for reissue and added three bonus tracks: "We Had This Time," the 1978 non-LP B-side to the "Don't Cry Out Loud" single; "Nice Girls" (co-written by Buckingham), a synth-pop track from 1983 that had been introduced on Manchester's Greatest Hits album and become a chart single; and "O Heaven (How You've Changed Me)," an early Manchester song from 1974 that highlighted the influence of gospel (and Laura Nyro) on her. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide