Photograph

Personnel: Melanie (guitar, background vocals); Dave Doran (guitar, background vocals); Dean Parks, Louis Shelton (guitar); Jim Drennan (keyboards, background vocals); David Paich (keyboards); Jeff Porcaro, Jim Gordon , John Gueren (drums); Angelo Mauceri (percussion, background vocals); Victor Feldman, Milt Holland (percussion); Jay Wolfe, Carol Parks, Denny Bell (background vocals).
Audio Mixers: Greg Ladanyi; Peter Schekeryk.
Recording information: Davlen Studio.
Photographer: Bob Cato.
Quietly and with little fanfare, in 1976 Melanie made her strongest record in years. Photograph was written over a number of years; Melanie had been shoring up her strongest compositions and withholding them from her previous Neighborhood collections. Her new home at Atlantic brought in fresh players (many of the session musicians soon to be Toto), and the Edwin Hawkins Singers, who had made "Candles in the Rain" such a treat, were back on hand. But Photograph was very much Melanie's own victory -- her material was a revelation, and more sophisticated than anything she'd ever accomplished before. "Save Me" remains one of her finest pieces -- a fiery, feverish song with a mesmeric David Campbell string arrangement. It puts her on a par with more respected peers like Laura Nyro. "Cyclone" was another of her strongest musical ideas for a while, and a highly commercial one, too; in fact, there's barely a wasted moment on Photograph, and it had more than enough potential to reassert Melanie as an artistic force with which to be reckoned. But despite the endorsement of The New York Times, which placed it highly in a year's end best-album list, Photograph faded before anyone caught a glimpse of it. ~ Charles Donovan