averyfineline

So now I’ve seen three or four of these Homecoming Best Of features on a single Homecoming artist (Anthony Burger, Lynda Randall, and George Younce among them), I’m surprised at the general low quality of production. I’ve seen dentist office waiting rooms with better lighting and décor than the settings for the AB and LR interviews and the interviews themselves contributed very little to a better sense of the artist. I should probably draw a distinction between tribute albums (post-mortems) and Best Ofs (which are generally for the living) and maybe another cross section would slice out personalities (Randall) vs Big Stars (AB and Younce). But even then there are common problems across all the albums that come down to one version or another of the problem I identified with George Younce’s tribute: they’re a little boring and pretty much fail to capture the very individuality and scope of the talent they attempt to celebrate (see here). All that said, I assume these things are gold mines, right?