Just Today

Approfondimenti

Bobby Vee was doing amazingly well in 1967 -- in the midst of the full blooming of psychedelia, he had the biggest-selling single of his career with "Come Back When You Grow Up," which heralded a late-'60s string of charting singles for him, and a burst of album activity. Just Today is easily Vee's most daring album up to this time, opening as it does with his covers of four Motown standards on three tracks -- and no, they're not exactly stunning moments in music history, though the "Medley: My Girl/Hey Girl" did chart as a hit for him, but they're not terrible or embarrassing, either; and Vee, with his producer Dallas Smith and arranger Lincoln Mayorga, shows some serious sensitivity to the music. And the rest of the album is solid pop/rock of its period, with Vee in good form, with more of a beat in songs like "Nobody's Home to Go To" than he had in some of the pure pop he did early in the decade (not that the soft rock arrangement was terribly significant in 1968). Essentially, he was doing exactly the same thing that Neil Diamond, Glen Campbell, and Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris were doing at the time, straddling pop and contemporary rock; other than the quality of Vee's singing, which is consistent throughout, the attribute that makes this album unique is Vee's sincere cover of "Sealed with a Kiss," which is his look back on his own early-'60s past. "Beautiful People" is an upbeat piece of late-'60s pop/rock with a catchy melody, and "Maybe Just Today" and "Sunrise Highway" are nicely contemporary (yet gently nostalgic) pieces by an artist a decade out of his era and still competing for a softer listenership.

© Bruce Eder /TiVo