Dan Hill
Longer Fuse

THE REVIEW

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.