As Ann pointed out, "FOREVER is the title and it's available on CD, streaming and vinyl. She
hasn't had a vinyl best of or greatest hits since 1974's Greatest
Hits. It's a double disc and there are 21 tracks."
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This title will be released on September 20, 2024.
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This title will be released on September 20, 2024.
So it's called FOREVER and it was released Friday, September 20th. I pre-ordered it over a month ago. AMAZON said then it would be delivered September 20th.
And?
Where the f**k is it? If you look above, they're promising that if you order it right now, you will get it Wednesday, September 25th. Really?
Because when I go to my AMAZON order, I'm told mine -- pre-ordered over a month ago -- should arrive by Thursday, September 26th.
Again if I ordered today AMAZON says -- says -- I will get it this Wednesday; however, I ordered it -- pre-ordered it -- August 2nd and mine will arrive a day after that.
Can someone explain to me what the f**k is up with AMAZON. They originally said, when I ordered it, that I would have it on September 20th but that didn't happen. And despite having my e-mail address, they never made a point in the 48 or so days I waited to let me know that there was going to be a delay. But, hey, that would require customer service skills and Jeff Bezos clearly doesn't believe in that.
So I'm working with a digital copy. What do we get? We get 21 tracks -- 19 of which were hits on at least one of the following three BILLBOARD charts: Pop, Adult Contemporary or Dance -- many were hits on two of those charts and five charted on all three.
The digital release gives you an additional 19 tracks featuring some of the hits left out in the first 21 such as three hits with Sonny Bono ("I Got You Babe," "Baby Don't Go" and "The Beat Goes On") and the following chart hits: "We All Sleep Alone," "Love and Understanding," "Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down" and "Just Like Jesse James."
That last one?
One of Cher's biggest hits. Bigger than many of the songs that made the first 21 and ended up on vinyl. Not only was it a top ten hit on both the AC chart and the pop chart (Hot 100), it also was of the top 100 songs of 1990 per BILLBOARD -- coming in at number 77 for the year -- right after Mariah Carey's "Love Takes Time" and right before The B-52s' "Love Shack." During her GEFFEN era, her most successful in terms of album sales and hit singles, Cher's other songs during this era that made it onto BILLBOARD's Year-End Hot 100 Singles were "I Found Someone," "If I Could Turn Back Time" and her duet with Peter Cetera "After All." During the GEFFEN era (1987 through 1992), she had 11 charting singles and two gold albums, one platinum album and one multi-platinum album. Pretty good for three studio albums (her fourth gold GEFFEN record is for her the greatest hits collection IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME: CHER'S GREATEST HITS).
The digital version, with its forty tracks, offers a stronger retrospective of Cher's recording career with 19 additional tracks, a live track (Cher performing U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"), a non-album track (the Phil Spector produced "A Woman's Story" makes its album debut), three Sonny & Cher hits). Yet even that expanded look fails to really offer the overview we need. "You Better Sit Down Kids" is not just one of her songs that made the top ten and gets overlooked, it's also a historic one. Cher sings as the man, a father breaking the news to the kids that he's leaving their mom. That was considered of interest in the sixties. "But who cares?" Carole King would note in 1982 of starting to perform "Hey Girl," a song she co-wrote in the sixties, "They're just words."
Next month, Cher finally gets inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And no collection can cover her decades of recordings, I grasp that. But two years ago, Steve Nicks recorded and released her version of Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth" (not to be confused with the great song Stevie wrote with Mike Campbell of the same name that appears on her 2011 IN YOUR DREAMS album). In the promotion of that release, music outlets and Stevie herself said it was the first time a woman (solo) had recorded the song. No. In 1967, The Staple Singers -- that's Mavis Staples with her sister Cleotha and her brother Pervis and their father Roebuck (Pops) -- recorded the song. But the first woman known to have recorded the song solo was Cher. And not only did she record it, she performed it on TV shows including THE GLEN CAMPBELL GOOD TIME HOUR.
So much of what Cher's done doesn't get the recognition or credit she deserves.
Cher could do "For What It's Worth" and pull it off because of who she was in the sixties. Yes, she was "and" of Sonny & Cher -- a duo that scored many hits. But it was a solo artist that Cher really charted her own way. She did songs about teenage pregnancy, she did divorce, she did Dylan. Until Joan Baez did a full album of Bob Dylan's songs in 1968 (ANY DAY NOW), no woman recorded Bob's songs as often as Cher -- not Joan Baez, not Judy Collins. In the 70s, she did her story songs. In the 80s, she got into her rock era. By the end of the 90s, she was into her dance era. I've covered that in the four-part series I did in 2010;
So 21 songs just aren't going to cover the diversity of Cher's career and adding 19 more tracks to make the forty-track digital version only makes that more clear.
I'm not really sure what else to say about the album. It sounds really good . . . but that's digital. I won't have the album in vinyl -- my preferred format -- until Thursday at the earliest. It feels like a must have but, since it's not fully out yet, I'm just guessing. Leave it to Jeff Bezos to tryy to lock Cher in the closet.
