Barry Manilow

Swing Street

2:00 A.M. Paradise Café

• One More Time

1987

 LINER NOTES

Music: Barry Manilow, Tom Kelly
Lyrics: Bruce Sussman, Jack Freldman

One more time
As we lie by the firelight
Let me hold you
Till you have to go away

Don't let it end
Let me pretend you'll stay

One more thrill
While we're still in our solitude
One more moment
I can touch you tenderly

Can this be real?
Doesn't it feel like a fantasy?

When night moves on
I'm afraid you'll be gone
With no reason or rhyme

So if I borrow
A bit of tomorrow
Is that such a crime?

Why can't we make believe
That the evening has just begun
Close your eyes to the rising sun
And hold me one more time

1. Paradise Cafe
2. Where Have You Gone?
3. Say No More
4. Blue
5. When October Goes
6. What Am I Doing Here?
7. Good-Bye My Love
8. Big City Blues
9. When Love Is Gone
10. I've Never Been So Low On Love
11. Night Song

• George Duvivier
• Mundell Lowe
• Barry Manilow
• Shelly Manne
• Bill Mays
• Gerry Mulligan
• Mel Torme
• Sarah Vaughan

1981

 LINER NOTES

I watched from my piano bench as all the musicians filed into the recording studio after their break. Gerry Mulligan talking with Shelly Manne. Guitarist Mundell Lowe with bassist George Duvivier. The great Mel Torme singing at the piano while the extraordinary Bill Mays played for him.

I had been rehearsing with them for three days and it was the three most satisfying days of my musical career. We were making my next album. An album I had titled 2:00 AM PARADISE CAFE. The music was smoky jazz. The lyrics were torchy.

It was a milestone in my life, not just because it was a great body of music and performances-and it was-but because for me it was a collection of music and lyrics that came from the heart.

For ten years I had found myself in the middle of a life that was so exciting, exhilarating, and successful that I had lost sight of why I had started in the first place. I was just trying to keep up. With 2.OO AM PARADISE CAFÉ, the experience of writing music for the sheer joy of writing had been so euphoric and natural that it came to me within one glorious week. When it was done, I couldn't believe I had written those songs. It wasn't as if I was writing them. It was as if I was allowing them to flow through me. I worked with my beloved friends/collaborators on the songs and it was a profound experience for all of us.

Each song, each note served to remind and strengthen me. "Yes!" I would holler each time I finished a passage. "Yes!" And I would pound on the lid of the piano when I was finished with another tune.

"Yes!" I would shout when I played the cassette back.

Now, getting a chance to record with the finest jazz musicians and singers was another emotional catharsis. Except for Bill, I had never met any of them. I had made a list of my "dream jazz band and vocalists," then I tracked them down and called them all personally. To my shock and delight, they all agreed to work with me on this project.

They all knew one another, but had never worked together in this kind of group, so it was exciting for them.

During the rehearsals I had to keep excusing myself to go to the bathroom and pull myself together. Why had I waited so tong to allow myself to experience this?

Hearing Mel Torme and Sarah Vaughan sing songs that I wrote redefined the meaning of breathtaking for me. I actually found it hard to breathe while they sang.

Marty and Adrienne were there for most of it and they grinned like children all day long. I kept calling Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman in New York, holding the phone up to the speakers so they could hear.

I had written and arranged the music so that each song would flow into the next with no fade-outs and no breaks. But I had intended to record the songs individually, then the connecting themes individually; later on I would edit all of it together so that it would sound as if it were one long piece.

"Well, Barry, what do you want to record first?" Michael Braunstein, our engineer, asked me through the talkback system.

"I had an idea as you were all filing in, " I told everyone. "Why don't we put the music in the order of the final album, and let's see how far we can get. I'll sing live too.

Everyone agreed and in a few minutes we were rolling.

As we went from one song into the next, I could feel a special energy beginning to happen. We had been rehearsing all morning long, and the songs were sounding great, but this was something else.

Each song had an individuality. Each connective piece of music felt silky and perfect. The tempos to each song were just right. These musicians had some how learned the entire album in three days and were playing forty-five minutes of original music as if they had known it all their lives.

And as I sang, I found myself totally lost in each song. It brought back the feeling that I had had years before at the Red Rocks in Denver. Once again I closed my eyes and I sang to the sky and to Brooklyn and once again I felt that euphoria that only happens when an artist becomes one with his work.

As we got to the sixth song, I realized we were actually going to record this album in one take. Impossible, but true.

By the time we reached the last song, "Night Song," the most ambitious piece in the album, the whole room was on edge. No one breathed as Gerry began the notes that would start the theme to "Paradise Cafe" and end the album.

When we finished, it had been forty-ftve minutes of straight playing and singing. Everyone in the control room burst into applause. Adrienne and Marty were standing and cheering, tears streaming down their faces.

I was wiped out. It was as if all the years in the hotels and the planes and the struggling frustrations and the going broke and the headaches were all washed away. And it had only needed one take.

For me, making the album, 2:00 AM PARADISE CAFE was much more than just making another album. It represented taking control of a career in which the light of success had been so bright that it had blinded me. It represented so much more than music to me. It represented love.

The concert at Blenheim Palace had given me a feeling of finally accepting and taking control of the part of me that had become an entertainer. The making of this album represented a new beginning. Getting back to the feeling of making music for the sheer joy of it, for the joy of music. This experience had come from the heart. Nothing could compare to it. I would never be the same.

-BARRY MANILOW

excerpt taken from "SWEET LIFE ADVENTURES ON THE WAY TO PARADISE"