Today’s confection: Margo Guryan’s 1968 platter of orchestral pop, Take A Picture. We’ve waxed on Guryan’s excellent 25 Demos collection here in the past, but Take A Picture further succeeds in taking the singer-songwriter and placing her compositions within a smart pop context not dissimilar from the headspace Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were working in around the same time. Think: sunshine pop meets vaguely psychedelic arrangements sans a good bit of the residual pap that tends to date and mar so much of the era’s work.
Below are a pair of tracks from the LP I chose for their dissimilarities. The first exemplifies the more “straightforward” tone of the album, whereas the second, “Love,” sounds as if it wants to blast off into the ether entirely; just barely holding on. Not surprisingly, much of the album tends to meld the two extremes.
MP3: Margo Guryan :: Sunday Morning
MP3: Margo Guryan :: Love
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25 demos is great
love her take on the wedding favorite, bach’s “jesu, joy of man’s desiring” in the song “someone i know”….
you might be interested to listen to this Hebrew cover of Sunday Morning,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZpYU1ROYfE
The singer is called Shula Hen, a pop star in the late sixties. the album it is taken from is a pop classic in Israel and this song is MEGA famous.
in the last couple of years, the song was used to follow a promo campaign of a cream cheese brand 😉
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_vFR8LOxDw