Set Me Free – CHARLIE RICH***

Set Me Free/By The Time I Get To Phoenix/The Proudest Loneliest Fool/I Miss You So/Just Like Old Times/Try A Little Tenderness/H2O/Very Much Alone/I’ll Just Go Away/That’s The Day/Got To See My Baby

Set Me Free was country singer Charlie Rich’s first album for the Epic label. At the time his music was at the crossroads of soul, pop, and the country music sub-genre known as the Nashville Sound or Countrypolitan.

“Though Rich was himself a fine songwriter, he was wise to record songs by all sorts of writers and from a variety of sources. He was such a fine interpretive singer that it would have been a shame to have restricted himself to his own tunes. In fact, on this particular album, he only wrote one song, the moody I'll Just Go Away. But it's the other material that makes this LP great. Nobody sings 'em like Charlie.” ,p> “The 'Silver Fox' has many faces and here he adopts the cross-over success where heavy strings transform country into radio friendly pop.”

“This is not as lavish and full-sounding as his later Columbia stuff, but a really quiet, laid-back album. The title track has a great organ intro with a speaking part and it sounds more like soul than a Billy Sherrill production. This was his first collaboration with Sherrill and they're still five years away from success. Here they're just testing ground it seems, with flawless results. Almost all the songs are ballad type material and Rich has always been better on the sadder songs. He breaks your heart a few times here, be it with an excellent By The Time I Get To Phoenix or the other standard I Miss You So, where he gets all the devastation out that this song needs."

“The overall mood is very melancholy, which makes this definitely an album for the later hours of the night.”

“The first album Charlie Rich recorded for Epic Records is far from his first great LP. This is musically diverse, but also with a few hints of the path he and Billy Sherrill would take, with ballads using string arrangements.”

“The background singers almost overpower Rich, but if you ignore the syrupy backup and focus on his sublime vocals, you will be richly rewarded. The man recorded lots of great songs, but for my money those were not necessarily his big hits. They would come later, but some of the best music came on his early albums.”