More of the Music of James Taylor
- This original Columbia pressing of JT’s 1981 release boasts incredible Shootout Winning sound
- Both of these sides are exceptionally rich, Tubey Magical and spacious – thanks, Val Garay!
- We were knocked out at how good this album sounds on a great pressing like this one – one of the more impressive 80s pop recordings we’ve played in some time
- The sound may be heavily processed, but that kind of sound works surprisingly well on the highest quality pressings
- 4 stars: “James Taylor bounced back from the spotty Flag with this all-original album led by his collaboration with J.D. Souther on ‘Her Town Too,’ his biggest pop hit since ‘Handy Man,’ and his biggest non-cover hit since his first, ‘Fire And Rain’…”
- If you’re a fan of JT’s, or Folky Pop in general, this has to be seen as a top title from 1981.
- We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Dad Loves His Work is a good example of a record many audiophiles would benefit from knowing better.
The soundstage and depth on our best Hot Stamper copies is HUGE — this is without a doubt the most spacious recording by James Taylor we’ve ever heard. If you want your speakers to disappear, replaced by a huge studio full of musicians playing their hearts out, this is the album that can do it.
This vintage Columbia pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What The Best Sides Of Dad Loves His Work Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1981
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For On Dad Loves His Work
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Tonality is Key
As usually happens in these shootouts, we learned that there’s so much more to this album than just great songs. What really makes this music work on the better copies was the result of two qualities we found were in fairly short supply:
(1) Correct Tonality
Most copies have a phony MoFi-like top end boost in the 10k region that we found irritating as hell. The longer we listened the less we liked the copies that had that boost, which adds a kind of “sparkle” to cymbals and guitars that has no business being there.
Now if you’re a MoFi fan and you like the boosted highs that label is famous for, don’t waste your money buying a Hot Stamper copy from us. Our copies are the ones with the correct and more natural-sounding top end. The guitars will sound like real guitars and the voices will sound like real voices.
(2) Lower Midrange and Bottom End Weight
When the vocals sound thin, bright and phony, as they do on so many copies of this album (partly no doubt the result of the grainy crap vinyl Columbia is infamous for) that hi-fi-ish sound takes all the fun out of the music. Many tracks have background vocals and big choruses, and the best copies make all the singers sound like they are standing in a big room, shoulder to shoulder, with the full lower midrange weight that that image implies.
The good copies capture that energy and bring it into the mix with the full-bodied sound it no doubt had live in the studio. When the EQ or the vinyl goes awry, causing Taylor and crew’s voices to take on a lean or gritty quality, the party’s over.
Transparency and That Feeling of Reality
Transparency is always a big deal on pop recordings such as this. Of course this has to be a multi-miked, multi-tracked, overdubbed pop record — they don’t make them any other way — but it doesn’t have to feel like one.
When you get a good copy it feels like all these guys are live in the studio. They may have their own mics, and are certainly being placed artificially in the soundfield to suit the needs of the track (kick drum here, hand-claps over there), but the transparency of the killer pressings makes them sound like they are all in the same room playing together, clearly occupying their own share of the space in the studio.
This is one of our favorite Taylor albums here at Better Records.
It’s the last album by the man that bears any resemblance to the genius of his early work. It’s steeply, steeply downhill after DLHW. (Case in point: His specials for PBS of the last few years are a positive cure for insomnia, with every song slowed down and all the energy drained from the material.)
But he still had fire in his belly when he made this one — one listen to “Stand and Fight” is all the evidence you need; the song rocks as hard as anything the guy ever did. (And it’s got plenty of cowbell, always a good sign.)
Side One
Hard Times
Her Town Too
Hour That the Morning Comes
I Will Follow
Believe It or Not
Side Two
Stand and Fight
Only for Me
Summer’s Here
Sugar Trade
London Town
That Lonesome Road
AMG Review
James Taylor bounced back from the spotty Flag with this all-original album led by his collaboration with J.D. Souther on “Her Town Too,” his biggest pop hit since “Handy Man,” and his biggest non-cover hit since his first, “Fire And Rain,” in 1970. Also included were “Hard Times” and “Summer’s Here,” not to mention the unusually impassioned “Stand And Fight.”