Well hello again, good old friend of mine…
Some albums seem to follow you around as if they have chosen you rather than you them. When you’re asked “What kind of music do you like?” they don’t leap to the front of the queue, indeed they’re more likely shrink to the back, tail between legs. The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ springs to mind.
The album which exemplifies this for me is Carole Bayer Sager’s 1977 eponymous LP. I can never quite embrace it, there’s some unaccountable resistance on my part. Yet I feel it embraces me.
Constant companion
Carole Bayer Sager has always been there for me through thick and thin. I don’t read anything especially profound into the songs and there are no hidden layers of meaning. Maybe the album is a kind of comfort blanket. The opening and closing tracks, Come In From the Rain and Home to Myself, certainly encourage this.
Carole sings to me only when no one else is around. That’s partly born out of necessity yet it’s given the album a kind of intimacy like no other.
I’ll play it when I’m preparing dinner. The ritual is familiar: uncork to Come In From the Rain, chop vegetables Until the Next Time, pasta in the pan to Sweet Alibis – dig that guitar break – and singing along to all ten tracks bar one: I’ve never enjoyed the chugging, discolite Don’t Wish Too Hard.
I actually like her voice, it never grates. I hear a cooing little girl and a cracked, mature woman in one. On her later albums her voice has ‘improved’ but her personality and charm is diminished.
The other Carole
The songs are mostly piano based and I’d long assumed that it was Carole at the keyboard aka Carole King. So it came as a surprise to learn that this is not the case.
Perhaps I wanted to hear the album as a kind of singer-songwriter confessional. If you had no idea who Carole Bayer Sager was (and is) and simply play the album, it does work that way. She never attempted a Carole King style reinvention and 1977 was a little late to board the singer-songwriter bandwagon. Bayer-Sager lacks King’s woody soulfulness and her themes are too resolutely romantic unless you want to posit You’re Moving Out Today as social commentary.
On examining the writing credits, the other discovery I made was that all the songs are co-written – with Melissa Manchester, Johnny Vastanao, Marvin Hamlisch, Bruce Roberts and Bette Midler. Perhaps this belies the singularity of the album’s title. Bayer-Sager is described as a lyricist before she is described as a songwriter and I’ve found it impossible to ascertain the division of labour.
So somewhat disavowed of my romanticism, I see that the album is essentially a vehicle for a highly successful, mainstream writer to showcase her compositions with a little help from her friends. Which does nothing to curtail my enjoyment.
Oh Carole!
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Carole Bayer Sager, whilst likable and well crafted, isn’t sophisticated or cool. The best of her work is perhaps seen as on a par with post-prime Bacharach (there’s a wonderfully indiscreet tale about how their marriage ended in her recently published autobiography – the woman has the driest sense of humour).
She moves into boring, international AOR territory with the 80s and 90s and the personality is lost. Yet I’d Rather Leave While I’m In Love is a fine song from a singular standpoint. Try Dusty Springfield‘s version if you find Carole’s just a tad too croaky.
I’m playing her song
It was the ’77 novelty (let’s call it that) hit You’re Moving Out Today 
which drew me to the album when I pulled it out of some long forgotten early 90s bargain bin. The song is untypical – overtly humorous and uptempo with a slightly 20s feel. It evokes the affluent, liberal lifestyle of mid 70s LA more strongly than any other I know – the kookiness, the kinkiness, the Tales of the City bedhopping lifestyle.
I suspect that it might be co-writer Bette Midler who provided the rubber hose, funny cigarettes and leaky water bed. The lyrics are daft yet I would be hard pushed to say they are good in a formal sense. They’re clever but undeniably cheesy. Who can resist the abandon of ‘pack up your rubber duck, I’d like to wish you luck’? It’s this unabashed quirkiness which is so missing from her second and third solo albums. They’re bland but it doesn’t matter. She isn’t the kind of artist where you need to take on the complete works.
Home to myself
When I moved house last year there came several occasions over a period of months when I observed the new place feeling like my own, as if I were sinking comfortably into it.
One was when I played Carole Bayer Sager for the first time. Doing so breathed a kind of warm, easy familiarity into the air. I uncorked the Merlot and poured myself a glass. Comin’ home to myself again.
It’s taken twenty-five years but Carole, I embrace you.
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