I got it for Pepper Mill for our anniversary, but she hasn’t even opened it yet.
The Monkees are going to be performing at Hampton Beach NH later this month, no doubt to publicize the album.
I quite like “Little Girl”. “Me & Magdalena” has become my favorite song on the album, but “Little Girl” is definitely up pretty high. It’s got what is somewhat of a Peter Tork signature that I’ve always been fond of: a meter wherein the lines don’t end where you think they’d end. Nesmith is one of my favorite songwriters but his one composition on this album, “I Know What I Know”, I would only describe as being just an o.k. song.
Pulling a Davy Jones vocal from an old demo wasn’t a bad idea, but this new version of “Love to Love” is practically indistinguishable from the version that’s long been available. It was already pretty fully produced. It wasn’t some obscure demo it was more of a complete song that just didn’t get released right away. Although I am aware that they recorded new supporting tracks and backing vocals, it really doesn’t sound that much different from the version that was released during the 80s and when I listen to the album as a whole it feels like they just included a repeat.
I’d say the weakest tracks are the Boyce & Hart tune “Whatever’s Right” or the Jeff Barry song “Give It Time”. It’s not that they’re bad, they’re just boring.
I like the album pretty well over all. My only complaints are the running order. There are 13 songs and Micky sings lead on 7 of them… but SIX of his lead vocals are tracks 1 thru 5 plus track 7. Pretty much the entire first half of the album is Micky. I think it would have sounded more like a Monkees album if they switched it up more. 7 out of 13 tracks means they could have alternated Micky/NotMicky for the whole length of the album- not that it would have to be so neatly divided as that, but the lopsidedness of the actual running order is pretty extreme.
Also, a duet with dead Harry Nilsson is a neat idea but it’s weird for it to be the opening track- to have a non-Monkee singing a lead vocal, even if it’s just half of a duet, doesn’t really open saying “Hey Hey We’re The Monkees!”
So, yeah, like the album a lot. It’s just the song order that I dislike.
BONUS POINTS:
This has been driving me crazy- the song “Birth of an Accidental Hipster” (great song, stupid title, douchey songwriter), has a line “Gone are the doubts of clouds I had before”. I know that this line is a literary allusion to a lyric in a previous song- I’m pretty sure it’s an older Monkees song (which is also what would make sense if you’re writing it into a new Monkees song). I can’t for the life of me get the original song to latch in my mind.
The line in the new songs matches the construction and meter of a line in an earlier song, it resembles- if not completely matches- the melody of the original line, and there’s overlap in lyrics- the original that’s somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind opens with “Gone are the” and ends with “I had before”.
But that’s all I got. Originally I thought that the full lyric was copied. In the original song the part that goes in the “doubts of clouds” place was always a lyric that I couldn’t properly make out. In the new song, I also couldn’t make out the “doubts of clouds” part before actually looking at the lyric sheet- so my first assumption was that it was a complete copy of the original line. However, Googling “Gone are the doubts of clouds I had before” only brings up the new song, so that’s what has me thinking the lyrics from the older song are different. Googling “Gone are the” “I had before” doesn’t help.
So, extra super Monkees bonus points to anyone who can tell me what is the older song I’m thinking of. It’s going to drive me nuts until I figure it out.
I thought the same thing. It’s not a bad song, or bad execution, but I would have put it quite a bit later in the album. And I also agree that the album is pretty heavy with Micky vocals. I’m a Nesmith fan, too, and I would have thought he could have another song on the album.