CANDI STATON: YOUNG HEARTS RUN FREE (1976)
1) Run To Me; 2) Destiny; 3)
What A Feeling; 4) You Bet Your Sweet, Sweet Love; 5) Young Hearts Run Free; 6)
Living For You; 7) Summer Time With You; 8) I Know.
It is a little unlucky that Candi's big break
had to come with the onslaught of the disco era, but at least she got her big break, unlike many less
lucky souls — with a little help from producer and professional songwriter
David Crawford, who ended up writing almost everything on her second LP for
Warner Bros. The shift in tone is abrupt — while, technically, most of the
songs here are «proto-disco» rather than proper disco, without the diagnostic
basslines, Young Hearts Run Free is
clearly a club-oriented dance record; and even if, at the time, this shift
could be regarded by Candi herself as a fun change of image, in retrospect it
joins the large number of similar shifts that ended up completely eroding the
artist's personality and making him/her just another faceless face in the
exuberant, carefree dance-pop crowd.
Yet, as it also often happens, it was not half
bad the first time around. Crawford
might be just a commercial hack, but he hacked out plenty of fun hooks for this
record — mood-wise, 70% of these songs are interchangeable, yet some of them
could stand their ground next to contemporary Bee Gees material. First in line
is, of course, the title track, which seems to be pretty much the only thing
that people remember about Candi Staton today — I'd much prefer her to be remembered
by something like ʽI'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheartʼ, but it's hard to
fight the appeal of a well-polished proto-disco groove when it is combined with
a good vocal hook and a message of youthful optimism rather than bitter
pragmaticism. (Actually, the song is pretty bitter — sung from the perspective
of an abused wife envying the young people their freedom — but on the
instinctive level, the only thing that matters is the anthemic "young
hearts!... run free!" slogan).
Next to that one, ʽRun To Meʼ, ʽDestinyʼ, and
ʽI Knowʼ sound like weaker clones of the big hit, but the vocal hooks are
different enough to simply offer the people more of what they want without
directly self-plagiarizing oneself. Slower ballads like ʽWhat A Feelingʼ are
less exciting, but decently recorded — as is the cover of Al Green's ʽLiving
For Youʼ, for which a pleasant bedrock is built out of tonally similar brass
lines and slide guitars. The only properly corny song in the lot is ʽSummer
Time With Youʼ, where they seem to be intruding on the Europop turf with
dubious results (or maybe it's just that Candi tries too hard to be subtle,
sensual, and seductive, with too much sexy breathiness — hardly the style of a
gospel-bred R&B belter who once used to be a minor competitor for Aretha's
crown).
Outside of all context, I would probably pass
the record by in the end, but in the framework of her overall life trajectory, Young Hearts Run Free is a bit of a
rejuvenating step forward — she may not be too responsible for the songs or the
sounds, but Crawford seems to have been working in her interests, and gave her
all this energetic, uplifting material to both alleviate her personal problems
and get her out of the rut she'd
settled into by 1974. And while I can't properly put my finger on it, or
explain what it is exactly that makes these
party-ready romps a tad more spiritualized than the average run-of-the-mill
party-ready romps, I still trust that old intuition and give the record as a
whole (not just its title track) a moderate thumbs up.
I seem to have lived my entire life, straight up to middle age, without ever once even hearing the name of Candi Staton. She must have once had a huge presence in Europe a la P.P. Arnold?
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