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Rating: If anyone remembers good old Dan Hill, it’s definitely because of this 1977 record, which, propelled by the single «Sometimes When We Touch», even made its way onto the Italian scene: a heart-wrenching song (or a panty-dropper, depending on the circumstances) with just the right emphasis in both lyrics and music, which I imagine was the reason I bought it back then.
Other than that, it’s an album of “honest singer-songwritership,” orchestrated without much originality – but featuring a fine contribution from Bobby Ogdin on keyboards – which nonetheless suffers from a certain verbosity: songs about love, written with a sincere touch, love that’s always troubled, evoked, or regretted, but only in the aforementioned song do they really hit on a phrase – a chorus, if you will – that sticks in your head and genuinely moves you.
Other times – most of the time – the lyrics fail to get to the point and drag on longer than necessary “explaining and recounting” feelings, as if instead of being a song it were a diary page of his heartaches. So, as a “second best” track, I’d pick the short and to-the-point «You Are All I See», while – despite the support of the lyrics in the inner folder – I found the title track and the closing «Still Not Used To» particularly “tough” to listen to.
In short, not exactly an essential album, with a cover worth forgetting and him – a Canadian from Ontario (a breeding ground that, some years earlier and on a completely different artistic scale, had produced such folks as Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, and even Bruce Cockburn) – he’s a respectable songwriter, but firmly confined to the category of “melodramatic sentimentality”, which, in this Celine Dion genre, will provide a few more charting hits throughout his career. As for LONGER FUSE (translation: una miccia più lunga, who knows what he meant by that!), you might as well just look up the “good” track online… if needed.
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