OK, I thought I wouldn't be able to review Tiffany's fourth album, Dreams Never Die, because it didn't appear in the list of albums (or even in the expanded list you can bring up to add items). But fortunately, Tiffany has a link on her artist page to write an opinion that's not under one of the specific albums that's listed, so I can use it to write this review. Some artists have this link on their page, while others don't; Epinions works in mysterious ways.

Anyway, it's understandable that Dreams Never Die doesn't show up in the listings here; it's a really obscure album, at least to the American public. You see, it was only released in Asia. Tiffany remained popular there long after she vanished from the American scene, so when she returned to manager/producer George Tobin (who produced her first two albums) after the failure of her R&B/dance-style New Inside album, he decided to release the album first over there and only later in the United States. Later never came, though, since Tiffany broke with Tobin once again soon after the Asian release; the album thus never came out in America.

In her Billboard interview this week, Tiffany revealed the reason behind this second and final split with Tobin; as it turned out, Tobin had, without Tiffany's knowledge, peddled second-hand songs to her: the songs on Dreams Never Die had already been used by one of Tobin's other projects, the "boy group" PC Quest. Even the instrumental tracks behind the vocals were the same on Tiffany's and PC Quest's versions.

Well, even if the songs turned out not to be new and original, this is still Tiffany's best album so far (not counting her upcoming release, The Color of Silence, due in October, 2000). Here she returned to a style more like her first two albums than the less-successful third (reasonably enough, given that the producer and many of the songwriters and musicians were the same), but without all of that repetitive teen-romance stuff that filled up so much of those early albums.

Incidentally, the Ebay auction I mentioned earlier, where I was selling an extra copy of this, is now concluded, and it went for $152.50. So it's quite a collectible now; good luck finding it.

Anyway, the tracks on this album are:

1) If Love Is Blind: Released as a single, this song became a hit in several Asian countries. It's a nice ballad.

2) Kiss You All Over: One of two covers of old songs on the album. At least this time they picked less "classic" ones than "I Think We're Alone Now" and "I Saw Her Standing There." This was done originally by the band Exile back in the late '70s.

3) Can't You See: Another nice, slow song.

4) Kiss The Ground: A nice fast song. I'm not quite sure what the lyrics are supposed to mean ("So I got up to leave / And he said after me / I know where you going / ... / I kiss the ground I stand on / I move around in circles / Don't let the light shine on me"), but it's a catchy song anyway.

5) Dreams Never Die: The title track, and another pleasant ballad.

6) That One Blue Candle: Still another pleasant ballad.

7) Almost In Love: This song opens with a sound like it might be a fast and heavy song, but it settles down into another ballad, though maybe with a little more of an edge.

8) Ruthless: A remake of a track that Tiffany used as one of her rare B-sides at the time of her second album (the original version can be found on the "Hold An Old Friend's Hand" single). A good, hard-edged song, though I think this version isn't quite as "edgy" as the original. I don't know just what the "computer dreams" are that "slip through your eyes". Are they what your PC dreams about when it kicks into its screen saver, or are they what you dream about after a long day of net surfing?

9) These Arms Of Mine: An old Otis Redding song. Pretty good; the style is a change of pace from the other songs here.

10) Sam Loves Joann: This one is in country style, foreshadowing Tiffany's next comeback attempt, which would be in Nashville a few years later where she tried (and failed) to get a country record contract before returning to California to do pop music. In this song she's pregnant and doesn't know what to do about it or where her lover went, while her lover doesn't know she's pregnant but has problems of his own as he's on the way to prison for car theft. Pretty sad.

11) We're The Truth: Back to the nice ballads, which are the dominant type of song on this album.

12) Loneliness: This track might have fit in on her previous New Inside album, as it's got all sorts of "experimental" sound effects, like weird synthesizer sounds and a beat which keeps moving back and forth across the stereo field. There's a song with vocals buried in there somewhere.

Anyway, it was a nice album, and it's too bad it never did come out on this side of the ocean (even if the songs were actually used first by another group).



Recommended: Yes