Barbra Streisand - Till I Loved You (Japan 1988)

Barbra Streisand's first album of new studio material in four years, Till I Loved You was led by its title song, a duet with Streisand's current paramour, actor Don Johnson, on a tune from a Columbia Records pet project, a studio musical called Goya, written by Maury Yeston (composer of the Broadway show Nine), that the label was encouraging its artists to promote. That embarrassing recording made the album as a whole seem worse than it was. But Till I Loved You, which was given over to newly written romantic ballads by people like Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, still wasn't very good. Eighteen songwriters, six producers, nine recording studios: like Emotion, Till I Loved You was a big-budget effort. But it was like a movie with a great star, great production values, and a mediocre script, so how much you liked it depended on how much you liked Streisand, and it sold to her fans only.