Reflections Of

From Burt Bacharach to Barry Mann and Paul Williams, over the years some of pop music's top songwriters have occasioned to record reinterpretations of their own hits. The middle hyphenate of the famed Motown songwriting team, Holland-Dozier-Holland, has an advantage over those three in that he's recorded in the past for major labels and received a Grammy nomination for his most recent recording, ...An American Original. His vocals are rich and soulful doing his old Supremes', Four Tops' and Isley Brothers' hits, but we're so enamored of the lighthearted arrangements of the originals that an hour of these songs done at such a slow tempo comes off as a bit sluggish. His intention seems to be to recapture them in their original form as ballads, and there is a heartfelt beauty and a depth to some of these songs; "My World Is Empty Without You" truly has an aching quality that helps you understand the depth of the lyrics much better than the Supremes' version. For all those pluses, these versions will never capture our hearts the way the old recordings did. Now that this is out of Dozier's system, it would be nice to hear more originals from one of pop and soul's true songwriting greats.