dtobias's Full Review: Hold an Old Friend's Hand by Tiffany (Pop)
Continuing in my process of reviewing all of Tiffany's albums in preparation for the grand premiere of her new album, The Color of Silence, coming in October, I am now reviewing her second one, Hold An Old Friend's Hand.
I have mixed feelings about this album. The best songs on it were much better than anything on her debut album. However, much of the rest of the album is filled with fairly interchangeable "teen-romance-pop" songs, complete with heavy dance beats and lots of synthesizers. It's not unbearable to me, but I prefer other stuff, and besides, that sort of thing was done better on Tiffany's first album. Her ballads are better, and she's got some good ones on this album, fortunately. I know that the teen market was what her producers were going for, which explains the predominant tone, but the album still manages to transcend this sometimes.
Incidentally, this out-of-print album has become very collectible; I just completed a sale on Ebay of one of these CDs at a closing price of $41. Good luck finding one yourself. You might get one for a better price if you're lucky; after all, the one I sold was one I bought a few days earlier at a used CD store for $5.99. (Nice profit margin, huh?)
The tracks are:
1) All This Time: A top-10 hit for Tiffany, and a very good ballad. Very un-teen-pop-star-ish; the general sound and the lyrics (about how she has a lot of time now to reflect on life without a departed lover) have a mature sound. True, she didn't write the lyrics, but she still sounds mature singing them.
2) Oh Jackie: The sound is edging a little back towards the teen-pop style, but not so much so that I classify the song in that batch. It's pretty catchy, and has some interesting lyrics like her asking if "I'm not just something you outgrew", which unfortunately turned rather prophetic when her popularity plummeted shortly after this album's release because many of her teenage fans did in fact claim to have outgrown her. (Her true fans stuck around, though, and are still active over ten years later despite few record releases from her in the interim.)
3) Hold An Old Friend's Hand: This was released as a single, but never made the pop charts. This is difficult to understand, as the style of this song seems like it should appeal to the same people who liked the top-10 hit "All This Time," except that this is an even better song. Written by Donna Weiss, it was first performed by Tracy Nelson in 1974, but that version is so obscure (I haven't even managed to find it myself) that few are even aware that Tiffany's version is a remake of an old song. It's another song with a very mature sound, and it's rather strange when you think about it for a 17-year-old singer to be singing lyrics like "Another year is dead and gone; the sun don't want to shine on this old hill, or anything that's mine." But it's a great song anyway.
4) Radio Romance: Now we start to get to the more monotonously similar "teen-pop" stuff, which is why I sometimes just play the first three tracks and stop there. Tiffany's last top-40 hit (just barely; it topped out at 30-something in the charts), this is one of her many songs about how the guy she wants is going out with her best friend instead, and this time she wants a radio DJ to play a dedication to try to win the guy over. All this is done to a really pounding beat.
5) We're Both Thinking Of Her: Yep, another song where she's pouting about how somebody else got the good guy instead of her.
6) Walk Away While You Can: A little change of pace; here, instead of failing to get a guy, she's got one, but her friends are saying that he isn't right and she should leave; and she's starting to think they might be right. It has some "teen-romance-pop" flavor to it, but it's an OK song anyway.
7) Drop That Bomb: While the last song had her friends giving her romantic advice, here she's giving advice to somebody else in turn. The "bomb" she wants dropped is "I Love You," which she's advising her friend to tell her boyfriend. Another teen-romance song, but reasonably catchy.
8) It's The Lover (Not The Love): A pretty nice ballad. Not as good as "All This Time" or "Hold An Old Friend's Hand," but good anyway.
9) I'll Be The Girl: She's saying she'll do absolutely anything for the lover she's singing to. A rather exploitative song, considering it was co-written by her manager/producer George Tobin, who was the one pulling the puppeteer's strings on Tiffany's career at the time. Rather than letting her develop strength as a person and as a musical artist, he put words in her mouth like "I'll be the girl that you want me to be", and "[I'll] do anything you want me to."
10) Hearts Never Lie: (Duet with Chris Farren) Another pleasant ballad. The album sort of has a split personality, with ballads like this alternating with a completely different style of teen pop in other tracks.
11) Overture: Not really a Tiffany song, this acoustical guitar solo by Grant Geissman wraps up the album with instrumental versions of parts of some of the earlier songs.
All in all, though there are some rough spots, it's still a fun album to listen to. But wait for her upcoming album in 2000 to hear how she sounds when she actually takes control of her own career instead of being led by an exploitative manager.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.