“Songs For The Gentle Man” by Bridget St. John - album review

features in: Album Chart of 1971Album Chart of the Decade: 1970s

TJR says

Bridget St. John only ever sings songs that she can relate to; songs that mean something to her; songs that come from her own experiences. Based on the evidence from her first 2 LPs, I can tell that in real life she is a gentle and lovely soul. These are early morning sleepy tunes that roll from your head as you fall out of bed to discover the day. As with her debut set, hushed melodies are prevalent, as is her trademark low-register acoustic-guitar-based delivery. This time around, however, she almost has a co-star in the Scottish-born avant-garde producer, Ron Geesin. The added cellos, flutes, bassoons, violins and horns are interwoven sympathetically – it’s a job well done. Speaking of the two-year gap since her debut, Bridget explained:

“There had been talk of my doing an album with Paul Samwell-Smith, but all that fell through and I was pretty sad as a result. It took me a long time to prepare the material and work everything out and after I'd given him the rough tapes, everything fell through, and I was left at a bit of a loose end. As it happened, everything worked out very well, because Ron Geesin produced the album and made a beautiful job of it as far as I was concerned. I knew Ron as a friend, and I just asked him if he would do it much to everybody's horror because they all associated him with weirdness and didn't think for one minute that he had the delicacy to handle the kind of songs I'd got ready to record. But that freaky stuff is only one facet of his music, the part that he chooses to project on stage, and I knew that he was capable of much more—for instance he'd just completed the music for 'The Body' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' and some of that was just beautiful. Apart from one song, “The Lady and the Gentle Man”, which I don't really like at all any more, that album turned out exactly as I wanted it to I think Ron put in some lovely work on it. At the time, he had his own studio, and I used to go round there and we'd discuss each song I'd go over it, and he'd note the chord shapes and so on, and then I'd leave it to him to arrange, so that when I next saw him, he'd have the arrangement all ready to record. That was very satisfactory from my point of view, and things worked out very well.”

The Jukebox Rebel
03–Mar–2016

Tracklist
A1 [03:14] 7.1.png Bridget St. John - A Day A Way (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
A2 [02:42] 6.9.png Bridget St. John - City-Crazy (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
A3 [01:50] 6.0.png Bridget St. John - Early Morning Song (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
A4 [04:42] 8.3.png Bridget St. John - Back To Stay (John Martyn) Folk
A5 [03:05] 7.9.png Bridget St. John - Seagull-Sunday (Bridget Hobbs, Nigel Beresford) Songwriter
A6 [04:05] 6.9.png Bridget St. John - If You‘d Been There (Bridget Hobbs) Songwriter
B1 [01:26] 6.3.png Bridget St. John - Song For The Laird Of Connaught Hall - Part 2 (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
B2 [03:50] 6.4.png Bridget St. John - Making Losing Better (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
B3 [03:06] 7.2.png Bridget St. John - The Lady And The Gentle Man (Bridget Hobbs) Songwriter
B4 [03:18] 6.3.png Bridget St. John - Downderry Daze (Bridget Hobbs) Folk
B5 [03:30] 6.7.png Bridget St. John - The Pebble And The Man (Donovan Leitch) Folk
B6 [00:40] 5.3.png Bridget St. John - It Seems Very Strange (Bridget Hobbs) Songwriter

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