Bradley's Buzz

Lisa Hartman Week - Day 1

It's about time we had a Lisa Hartman (Black) week here at Bradley's Buzz. I had been planning on doing it way back in June when it was her birthday and even a few weeks before that when she had released a new duet with her hubby Clint Black - oh, did you miss that one? Well stick around for Lisa Hartman Week... until then...

Today in our first day of looking at all the brilliance and hotness that is Lisa we head to the past - back to when our girl was but a wee 19 year old with a dream and some big wigs behind her - as we look at into our Bubbatunes vaults at the first ever Lisa Hartman album!! Wooh ooh!

Anyhoos, in her bio at the time she is compared to Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy and Ann-margaret and why the hell not? Her first album, the self titled beauty that it is, comes off full of countrified ballads and mid tempo love songs like those three other ladies (Ann-Margaret???) were doing around 1976 - that's right this is from 1976. She is even produced and co-writing with frickin' Jeff Barry who not only wrote some brillz songs for the Brill Building days but had in 1974 co-written "I Honestly Love You" for ONJ - alas, none of the ten songs on Lisa Hartman scored any charts - even with three singles promo'd out - but I'll never know why.... why don't we head back to another time where I talked about the first Lisa Hartman shall we? Of course we shall....


bub 45 Lisa Hartman - LISA HARTMAN (2004; 1976)

Oh yes, this is the highlight of the entire Bubbatunes Collection if you want my honest to God; the entire Lisa Hartman album releases on CD for the very first time ever; well at least in my hot little hands. My girl is known to most as an actress and or wife to country crooner Clint Black who she married in 1991. After a couple more years of acting, our girl got preggers and kind of semi retired to Nashville and the family life; but every now and then she can be coaxed out to do a TV movie or sing a country duet with her husband.

But prior to all of this, Lisa Hartman had a dream - a dream to be the next big Grammy winning singer and for a brief minute or two it looked like it may happen.

Discovered singing in a bar band in Houston by Brill building biggie Jeff Barry, the 19 yer old Lisa was shipped off to LA to record her debut album. 10 midtempo pop songs were written for Lisa by members of Barry's team, mostly by Jeff himself. Not quite country yet not quite rock enough to be Linda Ronstadt, Lisa Hartman is more a product of the 1976 adult contemproary set, think pre-Grease but post-country Olivia Neton-John. You know 1976 ONJ.

The whole Lisa Hartman album was a bit of a surprise to me. First of all I never even knew it existed until around 2002 when I found a tribute site to Lisa called Kentucky Rainbows. The title Lisa Hartman was used for the reissue of her 1982 album Letterock so when I found there was a whole different Lisa Hartman titled album I was in awe.

Soon after that a fellow internet Lisa fan sent me the two CD's of Lisa songs I talked about back at bub07, but it was missing 4 of the 10 songs found on this album. A short while later I found "He Ain't You" and "Right As Rain" but it wasn't until 2004 when I contacted that original Kentucky Rainbows dude did I get "Seeing Is Believing" and "Room Without A Door", and you can imagine how exciting it was to find out almost 30 years later, two new Lisa tracks I had never heard.

And let me tell you "Room Without A Door" is a pure gem. A ballad set with strings and the whole shizz, she sings straight from the gut for her man to let her back into his life and more importantly to actually share his thought and feelings, "You're a river much too deep for me baby/ you're a mountain much too high/and I would like to laugh with you again baby/ like we used to laugh before/ but how can I get next to you baby/ you're like a room without a door.." It's by far my favorite track on the debut album.

Lisa Hartman launched three promo singles, all of them pseudo ballads so prominent of the time - "Pickin' Up The Pieces", "Saying Hello, Saying I Love You, Saying Goodbye" (also issued as an actual single with 'So Glad I Found You' as the B-side) and "Kentucky Rainbows"; all three are of the same type of vein, love found, love lost, love gone; but the individual songs definitely have their own personalities yet none of them seemed to mesh with either the radio programmers or their listeners.


Luckily, we're still left with all 10 of these gems and the song "He Ain't You" a type of countrified pop about breaking up with a man for another man but wanting the first man back (who hasn't done that) actually became a hit for Lynn Anderson on the country charts, and since it's one of the only songs co-written by Lisa herself, it was in some way gratifying for her I'm sure.

Lisa Hartman opens with the uptempo "Somebody Been Lovin' Her" and it's catchy fun right from the beginning to the end. The first single "Pickin' Up The Pieces" comes in right after and shows off that Lisa was not fooling around when it came to her singing. She belts it out and you feel the feelings coming off of her. In fact the whole debut album is a very pleasant surprise in that it's not terribly cheesy in a way a lot of music in this genre was, and Lisa's voice is very heartfelt and full of passion. She has a mid range alto and doesn't croon or orchestrate in a Streisand kind of way but instead just sings from her gut and gets her feelings out there through song. What more could a listener or singer really want? '

After the rather dismal failure of Lisa Hartman, our girl took up some modelling and acting jobs including the lead in the ABC series Tabitha, a spin off the Bewitched series about Samantha and Darrin's daughter living life in LA as an assistant at a TV station. The show didn't do well and Lisa took another stab at a single with 1978's "Nobody Likes Lovin' More Than I Do", a more upbeat track than most of the debut album though it is similar in sound to the opening track "Somebody Been Lovin' Her".

The single tells the tale of holding your ground against a one night stand declaring as much as she likes "lovin'" she wants more than just sex. The single came with the equally entertaining "100 Different Ways" as a B-side, both included here as bonus tracks.

LISA HARTMAN - Lisa Hartman (bub45; 2004)
Track List:01. Somebody Been Lovin' Her 02. Pickin' Up The Pieces 03. Room Without A Door 04. Right As Rain 05. Kentucky Rainbows 06. Saying Hello, Saying I Love You, Saying Goodbye 07. Seeing Is Believing 08. So Glad I Found You 09. He Ain't You 10. The Ice Cream ManBonus Tracks:11. Nobody Likes Lovin' More Than I Do (Dreamer Of Dreams) 12. 100 Different Ways

Download LISA HARTMAN - S/T here.

Labels: Bubbatunes, Lisa Hartman

posted by swivek @ 7:01 AM