KARLA BONOFF : KARLA BONOFF - RESTLESS NIGHTS - WILD HEART OF THE YOUNG

 

Disc One (73:46)

  1. Someone To Lay Down Beside Me
  2. I Can't Hold On
  3. Lose Again
  4. Home
  5. Faces In The Wind
  6. Isn't It Always Love
  7. If He's Ever Near
  8. Flying High
  9. Falling Star
  10. Rose In The Garden
  11. Trouble Again
  12. Restless Nights
  13. The Letter
  14. When You Walk In The Room
  15. Only A Fool
  16. Baby Don't Go
  17. Never Stop Her Heart
  18. Loving You
  19. The Water Is Wide

Disc Two (37:41)

  1. Personally
  2. Please Be The One
  3. I Don't Want To Miss You
  4. Even If
  5. Just Walk Away
  6. Gonna Be Mine
  7. Wild Heart Of The Young
  8. It Just Takes One
  9. Dream

Label : BGO Records

Release Date : 2013

Review for Karla Bonoff (1977) (AllMusic) : If Karla Bonoff's debut album sounded like the sort of record that Linda Ronstadt or James Taylor were making at the same time, that shouldn't have been a surprise: the rhythm section of Leland Sklar and Russell Kunkel was the same, the tasteful chicken-scratching of guitarist Waddy Wachtel was present, and so was a cheering section including Ronstadt, Don Henley, Eagle associate J.D. Souther, and other charter members of the SoCal country/folk/rock club of the '70s. Also, Ronstadt had cut three of the songs on her last album and Bonnie Raitt had done one. All of this meant that, despite Bonoff's competent singing, which actually better accentuated the lyrics of her songs than Ronstadt's, it was hard for her to get out from under the shadow of the members of her peer group who had preceded her. Nevertheless, the album's ten songs paint an effective picture of the ups and downs of love, circa the mid-'70s.

Review for Restless Nights (1979) (AllMusic) : Karla Bonoff seems to have had some trouble coming up with material for her second album, which may explain why it took two years (a long time in the '70s) and contained covers of "When You Walk in the Room" and "The Water Is Wide," and also why the originals weren't as uniformly excellent as those on her first album. True, leadoff track "Trouble Again" was a gem (as Linda Ronstadt proved when she recorded it on her Cry Like a Rainstorm -- Howl Like the Wind album in 1989), but some of the other material was only pedestrian. As usual, half of L.A. was playing and singing on the record, which meant that you got people like Don Henley and James Taylor for your money. But Restless Nights did not represent the leap in quality that would have been required to vault Bonoff into the ranks of her star friends (it didn't have a big hit single, either), and so, instead of providing a consolidation of her reputation, it caused a rethinking of career direction reflected on her third album.

Review for Wild Heart Of The Young (1982) (AllMusic) : After two modest-selling albums, Karla Bonoff tried a new approach with her third, posing for a cover photo in a lace dress with a male model, cutting a specially chosen cover song for a hit single, and making an MTV video. And it worked, sort of. Paul Kelly's "Personally," a coy and catchy pop song utterly uncharacteristic of Bonoff's other work, did make it into the Top 40. But that didn't stimulate the album's sales enough to keep Columbia Records from dropping Bonoff. Beyond the commercial considerations, though, Bonoff's original songs, which made up the bulk of the album, simply were not up to the standard set by her debut, and Wild Heart Of The Young was the weakest of her three Columbia Records albums.