Dan Fogelberg
Souvenirs
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Released two years ago, Dan Fogelberg's first album, Home Free, acquired a cult, though it received scant critical or commercial notice. Set against a glowing Norbert Putnam production, Fogelberg's pastoral romantic ballads, delivered in a high, quavering tenor, sounded as appealing as sweet Crosby Stills & Nash. Souvenirs is more elaborately textured, a tour de force of instrumental and vocal overdub, in which Fogelberg sometimes sings four or five parts at once in a voice more detached and echoey than the one on Home Free. Produced by Joe Walsh, Souvenirs shows off Fogelberg's extraordinary sensitivity to vocal harmony and his impressive facility at mixing his
Read More own guitar (both acoustic and electric) and keyboard playing into crystalline textures. Though occasionally the overdubbing sounds like a substitute for melody, more frequently Fogelberg shows above average ability as a tunesmith. The title cut, an elegiac waltz, is especially captivating. A similar plaintive-ness characterizes "Changing Horses," "The Long Way," "Song from Half Mountain" and "There's a Place in the World for a Gambler," reveries about the passage of time, while the gorgeous production complements their imagery. The near preciousness of these ballads is offset by several tougher CSN&Y type songs (the best, "As the Raven Flies," is reminiscent of Young's "Ohio") and by one country rocker, "Morning Sky." While Fogelberg foregoes pathos in these songs for more down-to-earth matters, their sound is less distinctive than the ballads. Ultimately Souvenirs concerns itself more with aural perfection than with exposition of ideas. Fogelberg has succeeded in constructing a dream world of sound, polished beyond anything CSN&Y or Ian Matthews have attempted, and in the process transforms himself from one human voice into a studio choir. (RS 176) STEPHEN HOLDEN |
