The queen’s crown slips
Cher Dancing Queen Warner
OK, everyone, settle down. We have a question. This is important. No, really. Can someone turn the music down? Ready? OK: Put your hand up if you’ve ever asked for an album of ABBA covers by Cher. Seriously, who wanted this? Anyone? Crickets? We thought so.
Well, Cher, we guess, wanted it, maybe to buy a new yacht or fulfil some label requirement. Warner Bros Records clearly did, too, if only to profit on the icon’s appearance in
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. The whiff of a quick buck is so sour here that it taints the Swedish band’s bubbly compositions. Like one song’s chorus goes: Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
Cher offers a very deliberate, 10-track collection of classic ABBA songs, including
Waterloo, Mamma Mia and SOS. Inexplicably, she returns to Fernando for another swing, having already supplied a version for the film’s soundtrack. That cover is produced by former ABBA member Benny Andersson; the rest of the album is produced by Cher’s longtime collaborator Mark Taylor.
All the versions are fantastically well produced, mixed and arranged, but there’s a strange coldness in these tracks, as if all the fun was drained. Cher takes them all very, very seriously, like they were tunes by Stephen Sondheim instead of frothy disco songs. Her take on The Winner Takes It All is especially preposterous and pompous. Only one song, One Of Us, the final one on the album, reinterprets the original into something somewhat stirring and thoughtful.
The cleverness of the Mamma Mia! films is that familiar pop songs from the 1970s get sung by movie stars in a lush romantic comedy. That’s different from belting out the same tunes in a recording studio and not adding anything.
Please, Cher, go ahead and do an acoustic version or even a punk take of the ABBA catalogue. But Dancing Queen – except for one song – has nothing new to say and simply reeks with the appalling stench of greed. — Mark Kennedy/AP
Loretta Lynn Wouldn’t It Be Great Sony
LORETTA Lynn, now 86, hasn’t been touring since she suffered a stroke in 2017, but the Kentucky singer-songwriter’s creative output remains strong on her new album, Wouldn’t It Be Great.
For years, Lynn has been recording her extensive catalogue of songs with producing help from John Carter Cash and her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, ensuring that her legacy as one of America’s greatest songwriters and singers will continue for the next generation even as she’s had to slow down her public appearances.
Recorded before her stroke, the album was delayed a year as she focused on her physical health. The collection of Lynnpenned songs stays true to the country music icon’s favoured subject matters, from love, heartaches, drunk husbands and angry women, but also family and spirituality.
Half new songs and half previously recorded, her high Appalachian vocals are unmistakably clear and refreshing with simple bluegrass and acoustic instrumentation that highlights the lyric and storytelling behind her nearly 60-year career. For a woman who has outlived her husband, as well as some of her children, her loneliness and pain is heartbreaking on a song like I’m Dying For Someone To Live For.
Ruby’s Stool sounds like a companion to her classic Fist City, as Lynn’s feisty side comes out in a bar room dispute with another woman. Wouldn’t It Be Great is a sorrowful plea to her late husband Doolittle to give up drinking for the sake of their relationship and contains little gems of simple and personal writing, such as “love went to waste when my sexy lace couldn’t turn your face”.
On Ain’t No Time To Go, Lynn tenderly sings with just a soft banjo plucking in the background to “stay with me a little bit longer”. It feels like a promise to her fans that she’s got much more to say if they keep listening. —