Making A Good Thing Better review
For example, Olivia Newton-John is no rocker. And on the other hand, her singing is as far from traditional country music as her native Cambridge, England, is from Nashvillę.
She’s simply singing the smoothies with an occasional pedal steel guitar and fiddle added to give her an ever-so-slight country touch.
She’s the granddaughter of Nobel prize winning physicist Max Born and the daughter of the headmaster of Melbourne’s Ormond College.
But by turning her back on the academic world, she has brought music fans a fresh, tender, soft and sincerely feminine voice that won the Country Music Association’s Top Female Vocalist award in 1974.
That voice is at its best on the lights-down-low love song “Slow Dancing” on her album “Making A Good Thing Better” (MCA-2280). The title song, however, is a mish-mash of nothingness.
But she comes near to traditional country music on “I Think I’ll Say Goodbye,” a three-chord-type lost-love number with fiddle and mandolin backup.
Her version of Johnny Cash’s hit “Ring of Fire” is great.
And “Sad Songs” and “So Easy To Begin” are Miss Newton-John at her tender, interpretative best.