Andy Williams - Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head/Get Together With Andy Williams (CD)

All Music Guide

This entry in Collectables' series of discount-priced two-fer reissues of Andy Williams' albums combines two successive releases originally issued in 1969 (Get Together With Andy Williams) and 1970 (Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head). The compilers have sequenced the albums out of order, probably mistakenly, since the original catalog numbers would have suggested that Raindrops came first. The compilation would have worked better if the albums were presented in release order. Get Together was a typical Andy Williams album of the time, one on which he simply listened to what was on the radio in the spring of 1969 and picked out some tunes he liked -- Stevie Wonder, Neil Diamond, a couple of songs from the musical +Hair that had become pop hits. He wasn't particularly effective on such material, but he was much stronger when taking on a big ballad like "Yesterday When I Was Young" or "Love Theme From Romeo and Juliet (A Time for Us)." Raindrops appears to have started out (prior to Get T...ogether) as a far more ambitious effort, an album on which Williams had Mason Williams put together a folk-pop suite of material by himself, Mickey Newbury, John Hartford, and others, and assemble it into a musical suite. It looks like the record may have been delayed (hence the lower catalog number) and re-tooled into a more conventional effort featuring the title track and "Bridge Over Troubled Water," hits in early 1970. That was too bad; Williams was on to something here, and in the album's second half (tracks six through ten), which remains an uninterrupted musical suite, there is something new, at least for him. On this two-fer, especially with the backwards sequencing, that's hard to appreciate; mostly, this just seems like a collection of Williams' versions of late-'60s and early-'70s pop hits. - William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide Read more Less