With it being a digipak, I’m always worried that the package will be bashed up coming through the post. The Physical one was perfect though.
The good news ~ I get my CD today!! The bad news ~ says delivery by 10:00pm who delivers at 10:00 pm? Omg I’m cuing up Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting in my car to work this morning to see if that helps me get it earlier.
My copy arrived about an hour ago. Quite a nice package. Bob Stanley’s liner notes are comprehensive and detailed. There were a few things I didn’t know in them. It sounds like he made a lot of effort to get as much info as he could.
Just got the CD this morning. One thing I have noticed is that on disc 2 track 5, the full intro for Would You Follow Me is there. Was the truncated one a mistake on Spotify’s part?
Nice to hear you finally got the CD! The liner notes were really nice. Even Olivia's introduction was more detailed than I anticipated. Its a shame PHYSICAL was fairly low on this sort of content. It's clear they rushed PHYSICAL out last year to meet the anniversary.
This is good news about the cd. Are the tracks mixed up out of order on the cd? only 12 more hours to go lol
The intro is cut short on the lossless Qobuz version as well, which is 2:58 in length. The CD version has a longer introduction, and is 3:10 in length. I just checked the Spotify version, and it is also truncated in the intro, just like the Qobuz version. The track times are identical between the 2 streaming versions. Given that both services have the same mistake...I'm looking at you, PW.
Let us know how the sound compares from the Cd vs your Spotify ones. Especially the Toomorrow tracks.
The CD sounds better, but I Could Never Live and Roll Like The River still sound really bad. When Don’t Move Away starts directly afterwards, it’s like heaven as the sound quality is so much better. A few songs are in mono. The 1966 single (which actually sounds pretty good for it’s age), the aforementioned 2 Toomorrow songs (the other 2 tracks by the band sound very good), and all 4 acetate songs have have ‘flat’ centred mono sound. There’s a fair bit of sibilance on Game Of Love and Round & Round, but I suppose they did what they could.
I think we have to accept this is what we’ll get from now on. I’m guessing a lot of the remastering is done now. Probably by the same team, so chances are if you don’t like the sound on Physical and If Not For You, you’ll probably feel the same about the rest of them.
Pretty much, I think. I know I ordered 7 or 8 titles from an import seller in October 1998. They all came together.
Obviously where I am going with this is that this project could have been completed and out the door long ago. It does not take a year or six months to do a single album. While I am certain that there were boxes of tapes and other media to be sorted through, the core components should be readily identifiable and accessible. If this was a storage locker and you were doing a sincere organizational project - the first step would be to catalog everything. Only then could you begin to sort things out and group them. We know that a few non-album tracks trickled out about a decade ago on some Japanese reissues. Most likely things were somewhat in order back then. Someone earlier on the thread said that Olivia was financially savvy. I beg to disagree. I believe that she always had ownership of her catalog from at least the mid 70s onward which was a wise decision by her business managers. If she had business acumen she would have monetized these assets long ago - or at least had a plan to do so once she had complete ownership. Focusing on the future and not looking back is one thing. To abandon your life's work is quite another. The time for a comprehensive reissue program was thirty years ago. "Back To Basics" could have been the sampler of a more comprehensive box set. Let's pretend that this was on the drawing board, but was dropped when her health issues arose. A catalog campaign at the same time as the release of "Back With A Heart" could have also worked. In the intervening years we could have had multi-channel releases for albums like "Physical" and "Totally Hot". If she had all the money she ever needed, she could have donated the proceeds to her favorite charities. I also want to point out that to the best of my knowledge, none of the reissues has even been made available in Hi-Res formats for download or streaming. Leaving more money on the table.
All true, but I think all to often Olivia found ‘something better to do’ rather than focus on her back catalogue. I just don’t think it interested her that much.
That’s presuming she saw her back catalogue as her “life’s work”, though. I don’t think she did. I strongly suspect that by her later years she saw her charitable and philanthropic activities as being far more important. She even spoke of her journey with cancer as being part of her ‘mission’. It wouldn’t surprise me if she even felt that her success and fame was really a sort of precursor to the main event. I also think she recognised that her best bet for raising money for her good causes wasn’t via her back catalogue. Let’s be honest, this reissue campaign is highly unlikely to make millions for her estate. What *did* make millions was Olivia consistently leveraging her celebrity to attract charitable donations. So I think she knew exactly what she was doing, on a financial basis and otherwise, and what she was doing was always very focused “in the now”. It could certainly be very frustrating as a fan to see her pay such scant attention to “the old days” - and I used to rail against some of her recording choices (“An album of lullabies now? Are you MAD??”) but I get it now. I’m just grateful that where she did make reference to her back catalogue was through close to twenty years of pretty consistent touring since 1998 - something that seemed like an unlikely pipe dream back in the mid 80s to mid 90s (especially after 1992). And who knows what she had planned before her cancer returned? Maybe her thinking was that she’d tour for as long as she enjoyed it, and then, when that got a bit much and she settled into a life of semi-retirement on her ranch (I doubt she would ever have *fully* retired), she’d focus on stuff like curating her back catalogue? From our point of view as fans there can be lots of “what ifs” and “if onlys” (my biggest “if only” will remain the tantalising possibly of a full David Foster-helmed album in 1984, but hey ho!) but now that we can see the full sweep of Olivia’s career - and indeed, the full sweep of her life - I think that she’d feel that she made all the right moves, in perfect timing. I certainly hope so.
Sadly, I'm afraid that applies to me. I think they have been mastered for a more modern listener rather than an old guy like me. I'm glad for those who are getting something they want here, I'll make do with what I have.
So are you saying had she not had this last bought of cancer that ultimately took her life that we would not be seeing any of these re-issues?
