Manilow Feeling

Rare 10CD Japan collection released in 1999, entitled Lady Soul Collection, featuring titles from Phyllis Hyman, Angela Bofill & Evelyn "Champagne" King's catalogue.

On their new album “Closer to Paradise” Spark, the Classical Band, form a unique partnership with the internationally acclaimed countertenor Valer Sabadus to produce, in musical form, a feeling of longing, that wonderful, painful yet bitter-sweet emotional state ’twixt melancholy and happiness. The spectrum of works ranges from the classical masters such as Antonio Vivaldi, Robert Schumann, Gabriel Fauré, Erik Satie and Kurt Weill through to French chansonnier Leo Ferré, Italian cantautore Lucio Dalla, American singer-songwriter Barry Manilow, British synth-rock-group Depeche Mode and the German cult band Rammstein. Rounded off with some compositions by the Spark musicians themselves, the pieces blend into an aural study of emotions, the fruit of an exciting musical collaboration and a consistently thrilling recording project.

Three Dog Night garnered three hits off of their 1974 release, Hard Labor, with material from John Hiatt, Allen Toussaint, and David Courtney/Leo Sayer. This time around they obtain their 21st and final Top 40 entry with a Dave Loggins song, "'Till the World Ends," and it is no "Pieces of April," the lovely composition from the same songwriter which landed in the Top 20 for the group two-and-a-half-years earlier. The problem with the song is the same dilemma faced by the album, Coming Down Your Way, the band seeking another genre to conquer while keeping their eye off of the precise and major Top 40 activity which was their bread and butter. Keyboard player for the Blues Image, Frank "Skip" Konte, joins Jimmy Greenspoon on the ivories with the Monkees/Barry Manilow bassist Dennis Belfield onboard as well.