"Love Is My Only Crime" 1993

Hello I listened to the album only just once so I can only give a superficial assessment.
Well, some of the s0ngs sound like a hopeless and dour Kenny Rogers singin the blues, but others are truly wonderful, incendiary, deep and passionate. Can’t help but compare their singing and artistry to those joyless travesties of love songs hawked by manufactured boybands and glazed-eyed blondes in the Billboard charts.
Indeed, these are gems and thanks for rescuing them from obscurity and exposing to lovestruck folks like me.
“I love you a thousand ways’ by Barbara Manning shines with simplicity and warmth, “vagabond smile” is like Bob Dylan in less complicated guitar playing, “trondossa” is perfect bar room music, and WHITE BIRDS is so provocative and magnificent, like a rebellious girl who’s grown waaay old beyond her years. I love its vintage feel. and MUSIC MAESTRO is the perfect way to end this album: first it’s like a 50’s movie and a lonely weary hunk dreaming of lost loves is surrounded by giggling girls and he asks the waiter for a drink w/ chaser “to chase the blues away”, then suddenly it’s like it’s just him and his piano and he’s nursing his broken heart in the bar night after night, but still so elegant and suave and undaunted and so contemporary and continental, like how Tom Waits would sound like if he’s a lot more handsome…
Then we hear again, for a second, the noise of the bar around him, he gets up and says good night to the waiter and tomorrow we know he’s ready for another one night stand…a short, beautiful song that captures the gorgeous cycle of melancholy and ill-fated amours that I guess love is all about, for some. - Miss FRight now it doesn't seem to be explicitly in fashion to have a heart and to real it in music. But there are plenty of appealing bundles of emotion to be gleaned far away from the main thoroughfares. And this is good, because: HEARTS MUST BURN! Again and again, it turns out that the most beautiful love songs can be found in just those undergrounds, in hidden clubs and rustic honky-tonks, in whichemotional anarchists, tragic broken hearts, gallant seducers or constant losers populate the scene in order to indulge in cultivate a perpetual myth and, while doing so, leave no room for average, lovesick trash: they rather deal with love, which bursts into flame and quickly fades away, which causes confusion, pain, destruction, death and is only rarely just simple and pleasant.
That "crazy little thing" which for some is "the only crime" has been used as an excuse for so much...
So if you ask musicians seriously for a contribution to a "Love Compilation", they either one in stock or enthusiastically sit down to write one: depending on their mood and the condition of their heart, it comes out either a desperate tear-jerker, a withered passion, a song full of rainy melancholy, bitterness or sentimentality; a song which sunshine is always mixed with shadow. - liner notes

trax:
1. Michael Hurley: Dialogue Of Love 2. Barbara Manning: I Love You A Thousand Ways 3. Walter Salas Humara: Upside Down Instead 4. Country Rockers: Mexicali Rose 5. Sonya Hunter: Demons 6. Charlie Feathers: Pardon Me Mister 7. Townes Van Zandt: Waitin' For The Day 8. Gibson Bros.: I Don't Wanna Forget How To Jive 9. Baby You Know: Vagabond Smile 10. Alluring Strange (ex-The Hellcats): Prison Love 11. David Earle Johnson: Trondossa 12. Ben Vaughn: Love Won't Go Away 13. Lorette Velvette: White Birds 14. Je & Ill: Kiss & Kill 15. Sid Selvidge: Tall Girl, I Love You 16. Sylvia Juncosa: (Lost In) Love Hell 17. Moe Tucker: Teenager In Love 18. Alex Chilton: You Can Bet Your Heart On Me 19. FSK: Das Hab Ich Falsch Gemacht 20. Bob Lyng: I Wanna Be Killed By You 21. Tav Falco's Panther Burns: Music Maestro Please