Rosemary Clooney - Thanks For Nothing (2002)

Tracklist

01. Hello Faithless
02. The Rules Of The Road
03. Just One Of Those Things
04. All Alone
05. Black Coffee
06. A Good Man Is Hard To Find
07. Baby, The Ball Is Over
08. The Man That Got Away
09. I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues
10. Miss Otis Regrets
11. Thanks For Nothing
12. Careless Love

Thanks for Nothing was Rosemary Clooney's only album recorded for Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records. (Love, released by Reprise in 1963, actually had been recorded for RCA Victor in 1961.) It was also her last full-length LP project until she began recording for Concord Records in 1977. In his discography included in Clooney's autobiography, Girl Singer, Michael Feinstein notes that Clooney "isn't very fond of this album because the stresses of her personal life are audible on many of the tracks." But those very stresses, which included marital discord and a dependence on prescription drugs, may have contributed favorably to the final product on an album devoted to songs of love gone wrong, much in the mold of Sinatra's Only the Lonely. Arranger/conductor Bob Thompson isn't interested in making all the tunes into saloon ballads, however. True, here you get Clooney's take on "The Man That Got Away," and it isn't very different from Judy Garland's, while Clooney's interpretation of "Black Coffee" resembles Peggy Lee's. But the album opens and closes with country songs of a type Garland and Lee would never imagine trying, while Clooney sounds right at home. And "Just One of Those Things" (complete with introductory verse) and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" are taken at a jaunty pace that suggests the singer is going to be able to pick herself up off the barroom floor without assistance. Best of all are Carolyn Leigh and Cy Coleman's "The Rules of the Road" and the title song, which Clooney handles with her clear-spoken matter-of-factness. She may have been fading away personally and professionally at this point in her life, but she had one good album left in her, and this is it.

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