Search - Perry Como :: Dream on Little Dreamer

Another sampler of Como standards!

townsend@istar.ca | Nova Scotia, Canada | 02/13/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"A re-release of Perry's 1973 RCA Camden album, this nine song compilation really amounts to a sampler for several of Perry's 1960s albums including "By Request", "The Songs I Love", "Lightly Latin" and the title track from his very first Nashville album "The Scene Changes" ( and the hit single to boot ) recorded in February, 1965, plus two tracks from one of Perry's most beautiful albums "Look To Your Heart" recorded in 1968. With only 9 songs, this album is desperately short at less than 30 minutes in length. Very oddly, it's packaged within a box-set including two other Camden compilations "The Shadow of Your Smile" ( 1972 ) and "The Lord's Prayer" ( 1969 ) of which the latter is a peculiar combination within this set. Apart from the odd combination, however, none of the recordings appear to have been remastered from the original first generation tapes as is claimed. Nevertheless, on it's own this combination is a nice mix of contrasting songs from different albums. Perry's 1969 compilation "The Lord's Prayer" ( mostly recorded from the early 1950s ) would have been much better had it been remastered from original recordings and better combined with the 1956 monaural compilation "I Believe", marketed appropriately to a Christian audience and not combined with popular standards. For some peculiar reason, Delta has used all new graphics for these re-released albums and the photos are not only out of context ( as with this album, from almost a decade earlier ) but the pictures are mirror-image! Do they forget what Perry looks like? This very thing happened in 1957 with Perry's first RCA Camden release "Dream Along With Me" and, as the story goes, Perry raised the roof with RCA and made them re-print the album covers. While graphical errors hardly affect the performance, they represent a clear indication of Delta's care, or lack of it, in releasing these albums."