A Lost and Found ROY ORBISON Album

Original released on CD Universal B0023169-02

(US 2015, December 4)

“One of the Lonely Ones” - recorded in 1969, this 12-track Roy Orbison album has never before been available to the public. This a completely unreleased ‘new’ Roy Orbison studio album, recently discovered by his sons. Rock critic Ken Emerson once wrote about the crescendo of Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” «his love, his life, and indeed the whole world seemed to be coming to an end – not with a whimper, but with an agonized, beautiful bang». The sound of Roy Orbison’s voice is one of the most singularly beautiful things in rock and pop music. It is not just his famed vocal range, his voice had a tone like no one else’s, and he was equally comfortable hitting the high and the low notes and invigorating those in between. He specialized in ballads, dramatic ones, sweeping as well and quiet ones, and his reading and understanding of them was carefully in unison with what he knew he could do with them with that unique instrument that his voice was, and still is when you listen to it today. There is ample proof of this on this new album that was not released at the time. Though there are no crescendos of the magnitude of the finale of “It’s Over”, there are certainly examples of perfect matches of singer, voice and song. One is “Sweet Memories”, a Mickey Newbury song.

Roy’s vocals turn what could have been self-pity into strength and beauty. He must have seen a kindred spirit in Mickey Newbury, for he successfully bent a number of his songs into expressions of his own style: there is “Leaving Makes the Rain Come Down”, also on this album, and one of Roy’s best 70s recordings “I Remember the Good”, “Here Comes the Rain Baby”, which was used as B-side, and a couple of songs on the album “Many Moods”. Two other examples of perfect matches are the title track, written by Orbison-Dees, and “I Will Always”, a Don Gibson song. “Say No More” and “After Tonight” are examples of the sweeping ballads that Roy sings with ease and full use of his range. The two songs are interestingly by Sammy King, the person who wrote a very different kind of song for Roy, “Penny Arcade”. “Laurie” and “Give Up”, two mid-tempo songs, are almost playful, virtuoso demonstrations of his lithe vocals. “The Defector” and “Little Girl (in the Big City)”, both good, strong songs, are social commentaries, not a genre much developed by Roy, though “Southbound Jericho Parkway” from the same period was somewhat in that vein too. The two remaining songs are a beautiful rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and an effective up-tempo song “Child Woman, Woman Child”, which could have been picked as a single at the time. On the whole an inspired album that bears comparison with the best of his albums. (in Amazon)