Favorite Tanita's CD

[bluedog]

 

[Hikka]

Definitely The Cappuccino Songs. It was the first album I heard from Tanita and I think it's the best as a whole thing.. as an album. Though I do love everything she's done.  

[Eric]

That's 'Ancient Heart' and 'The Sweet Keeper' for me , the two albums that started it all ...
I was in love with her music from day one ...  
I also love the other albums , but the first two will always have a special place in my heart ...  

[DeeDee]

Eric,
You're right about the first two albums. In my view they set the 'classic' Tanita sound, which had a great following in the late 80s, early 90s.

Personally, I'm not really into the cheesiness of The Cappuccino Songs, though genereally speaking, there are some nice songs on it. What it lacks though, is the intimacy of the previous albums. Especially Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which is still my fav.

[PoorCow]

Lovers in the City simply breaks my heart. I feel it is her most mature and well-crafted artistic statement.

While I agree with the above statement that Eleven Kinds of Loneliness benefits from its more intimate approach, it seems to me that the intimacy achieved by Lovers is more focused and fully realised, at times hypnotic, as in Bloodlines, at times devastating, as in My Love Tonight. Loneliness seems slightly anemic and sketchy to me in comparison (though I love Heal You and the b-side Rock Me Til I Stop is among her absolute best).

[WadeG]

Mine is probably "Everybody's Angel", though "Ancient Heart" is very close and on a different day I might pick it.  I also love "The Sweet Keeper".

"Everybody's Angel" I love partly because of its warm but punchy and ...  I don't know, just a very "alive" sound to it.  The songwriting quality is consistanty high on it as well, I think.

Wade

[PoorCow]

It is difficult not to enjoy Everybody's Angel - it is probably Ms. Tikaram's most confident album, and often quite infectious. It is one of the few albums that pay homage to soul music without sounding like a parody or plastic simulation. Perhaps my only reservation about the album is that the particular writing style used in the lyrics often works against the more visceral intent of the music, leaving a somewhat unsettled impression. I think it is possible that this effect was deliberate, and I actually find the lyrics constantly interesting, even when I can't pretend to understand all of them. The lyrical ambiguites seemed to work better in the more mysterious context of Ancient Heart. But Everybody's Angel is great; it is an incredibly strong step forward after the somewhat disappointing Sweet Keeper.  

[Graham]

 I agree that The Sweet Keeper is probably TT's weakest album but one thing I did like, for the first couple of songs at least, was the way that it cut loose from the smoothness of Ancient Heart (emotional, vocal and thematic) and allowed more room for the slightly raw edges that you can hear live in concert and on earlier b-sides.

Ancient Heart for me was closer to a concept album with this cool, detached persona watching life and love from afar etc (though the loud bit in "He Likes the Sun" almost did make me jump the first time I heard it!). I think that at as well as being a great success artistically, it was also a clever piece of production to make something so marketable from what the (record company) suits might think of as unpromising material.

Everybody's Angel for me is a great album to fall asleep to but I really don't mean this as an insult I just find that the cryptic lyrics have an interesting effect with the way the mind works when you are dropping off and the music is also quite soothing!

[PoorCow]

I agree that some of the vocal work on The Sweet Keeper sheds the more mannered approach on Ancient Heart, particularly on Thursday's Child and Love Story. Nearly every song on Eleven Kinds of Loneliness also demonstrates Tanita's willingness to stretch her technique, with even more success, as on Heal You and To Drink the Rainbow. The song structures on The Sweet Keeper are in some cases more complex and interesting than those on Ancient Heart as well. Perhaps what I find most maddening about the album is that it would have worked so much better without the anticeptic production that was lavished upon it; potentially charming songs like I Owe It All To You are made to resemble the backing track of any anonymous pop hit of the time. When the near-yelp occurs in Thursday's Child ("Couldya? WOULDYA?"), the effect is made even more startling because the music it leaps out from is so slick.

[Graham]

One thing I did notice about the lyrics of the Sweet Keeper is how references to "telling stories" of one form or another crop up all over the place...

"I'm not selfish with my story/I just want something, understand"
"He tells us everything/We want him to stop"
"And I told a million stories/And I sat down to risk half"
"And if I was telling you stories/I was only trying to surprise"
"I have a picture/Its painted with looks/It won't tell me a story"
"And everybody was here/Telling their own sad stories"
etc

...which is maybe something to do with the idea that one's public face is a kind of fiction or maybe just a side effect of writing lots of songs in hotel rooms in a fairly compressed time period. My least favourite track on TSK musically would have to be We Almost Got it Together as it just sounds so forced and desperate-for-a-hit although lyrically is isn't too bad. Bookending this track with It All Came Back Today and Consider the Rain used to make the album drag in the middle for me, although I still love to wallow in these slow-and-poetic tracks when the right sort of mood has taken hold.

[PoorCow]

Speaking strictly for myself, an entire album filled with songs resembling It All Came back Today could only be a good thing. I feel it is the only song on Sweet Keeper with any claim to perfection. Obviously I do not expect everyone to share this opinion.

Graham makes a good point about We Almost Got It Together - I remember when I first heard the single in advance of the album's release I was quite disappointed. I was particularly bothered because Ancient Heart demonstrated that Tanita's singles could succeed quite well without making crass concessions to the mainstream. Some might argue that her most successful song, Twist In My Sobriety, flies in the face of all conventional pop wisdom: it is moody, literate, restrained, very much demanding to be taken on its own terms. Having said that, We Almost Got It Together is a bit of goofy fun. Most of the songs on Sweet Keeper sounded great in the concerts just before and just after the album's release, particularly Little Sister Leaving Town. I've always considered the concert bootleg Like A Moth To A Flame an essential accompanyment to Sweet Keeper.

[Graham]

I have had another think about why WAGIT doesn't work for me when Back In Your Arms and If I Ever sound fine and why I used to think that It All Came Back Today and Consider the Rain were a bit of a drag when I obviously don't think that now.

WAGIT has some interesting moments lyrically, but I think the rot sets in with the opening musical flourish that is repeated several times throughout the song. There is also this really sudden tone shift from the thoughtful and knowing persona of the previous songs to the rather self-conscious goofiness of WAGIT. And I think that some of TT's normal lyric style starts to cut through the plastic pop veneer, so that the song is pulled in two opposing directions and doesn't sound very comfortable with this contrast.

As for IACBT and Consider the Rain, I am probably in a better position to appreciate these songs at the age of 32 than I was when I first heard them at 18. Though I know that TT would only have been 18 to 20 when she wrote them and that this comment applies to me personally and not to all 18 (or 32!) year olds. For me, these songs are more to do with reflection from a distance in time and space (emotion recalled in tranquility?) than with the here-and-now emotion of Thursday's Child or Once and Not Speak, and it probably took me longer to appreciate it. They also clash terribly with WAGIT in the middle although this is more a problem with WAGIT than with these songs.

[PoorCow]

I agree that We Almost Got It Together sounds conflicted, as if the pop-friendly backing track and Tanita's vocal and lyrical content are pulling against each other. A similar comment could be made about the entire Cappuccino Songs album, except that in this case it is entire songs sitting uneasily alongside one another, as opposed to the internal elements within a song. A case could be made that songs like Back In Your Arms and If I Ever have no business whatsoever being on the same album as Amore Si and Still Listening. The more pop-oriented songs on Cappuccino Songs seem to have been written and produced with clearer intentions than We Almost Got It Together.   

Several people have presented this arguement to me, and while I sympathize with their point of view, I think the arguement only succeeds if you diminish the unifying element of Tanita herself and her unique sensibilty, which tends to bind together the disparate songs on the album with more success than some people are willing to admit. It is true that there are moments of unashamed pop on her albums, but I do not consider these moments completely generic or without charm. Even when Tanita's more esoteric writing tendencies are witheld, such as in Back In Your Arms, wonderful little turns of phrase still manage to rise above the modest pop intentions of the song; the phrases: "this isn't a party I would have thrown / this isn't a season I would have chose" come to mind. 

[Zsombor]

Hi Everyone,

I love all the albums, but my favs are AH and TSK;
 the mood of AH is like a browned black and white picture, and have both happy and serious, thinkful mood...and the lyrics are wonderful...
TSK is more colourful album, it's very great, too, but more serious than the previous one.
The Ea is -I think- Tanita's happiest and funniest album, but the brass and the strings sometimes are boring, and the most of songs seems same.
Ekol-good one but there is some song which is very weak, they are I grant you and Love don't need no tyranny.
LITC-the arrangement is very wonderful, but it's a little sleepy album, and the drum programming is too much for me.
TCS- it's the album I listen to it very rarely, it's too pop music for me.

Zsombor from Hungary

[zuy]

i definitely agree with those of you who say 'ancient heart' will always be the best.. it's truly a classic on its own!