Body Talk 02: The 1996 Releases

We've discovered a few posts initially planned for previous themed series here on The Hideaway in our Drafts folder. We've freshened them up and are proud to present them.

Last time out, we covered the formative years of a Time-Life Music series before its official launch as the company worked out a template over a few collections issued in Europe before releasing a prototype in the US in 1994 titled Body Talk featuring romantic songs from across four decades and the genres of pop, rock, country, and R&B.

The first nine volumes of Body Talk: The Language Of Love 1965-1995 were mailed to subscribers throughout 1996. The albums were Time-Life's first double-disc subscription music series, paving the way for more series in that configuration such as The Hideaway favorite Modern Rock. Each Body Talk disc contains a dozen tracks or twenty-four songs per album from 1965-1995 just like it says on the tin.

My initial plan was to feature Body Talk among the other love song collections for Summer Slow Jams in 2015. Ultimately, I went with the R&B/Quiet Storm type Time-Life collections for that series of posts including Quiet Storm, Body + Soul, and Classic Soul Ballads as they were more in line with the other collections featured. 

The first volume in the Body Talk series is Forever Yours and it sets the tone for the rest of the volumes in the series with excellent sound, skimpy liner notes, and all the adult contemporary tracks you could ever want. There seems to be something of a break-up theme to the songs here. We like or love 17 of the 24 tracks so we're giving Forever Yours ⭐⭐⭐⭐ on The Hideaway's 6-star scale. (Can you spot the typo on the rear cover art below?)

Just For You is the second volume in the Body Talk series. Our friend Ron Gerber analyzed all 22 volumes in the Body Talk series and found nearly all of the songs are digital clones found on previously released collections from Time-Life and Rhino. Ron also created an index of the songs sorted by artist if you want to take a peak. Although it sounds really good to our ears, Just For You gets ⭐⭐⭐as there are just as many skippable songs as playable ones for us. Had I been a series subscriber, Just For You would have more than likely been returned.

Volume three in the series is Moonlit Nights though there are numerous instances online (and in my notes) where it is written as Moonlight Nights. There are two Linda Ronstadt songs and more to like about Moonlit Nights but not enough to earn more than ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

Together Forever is the fourth volume in the Body Talk series. If you're playing along at home, you may have noticed that of the ninety-six different songs featured on the first four volumes of Body Talk, only one of them has been from the decade of the Nineties. Together Forever flips nearly all of my switches and pushes all of my buttons in a good way - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

The fifth volume of the Body Talk series is Sealed With A Kiss. Like its predecessors and (spoiler alert!) all future volumes in the series, titular songs are absent from their same-titled discs so there is no "Sealed With A Kiss" here. Or on any other volume. And although "Always and Forever" will (spoiler alert, again!) eventually appear on three volumes in the Body Talk series, that song does not appear on the album titled Always and Forever. Once again, there is a strong, highly listenable twelve-song album easily waiting to be created from these twenty-four tracks.⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

Only You is the sixth volume of the Body Talk series. It is also the sixth and final volume in the single-disc Body Talk shadow series which we'll feature in the fourth and final post of this series. Though it would be so much better had it included Yaz's "Only You", we count fifteen favorites on Only You earning it ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

The seventh volume of Body Talk is Hearts In Motion which features no less than ten songs with the word love in the title. This was the first album in the series to actually list a recording engineer with the credit going to Dennis Drake. Drake has mastered some of our favorite collections including James Brown's CD of JB (1985) and Star Time (1993), Rush's Chronicles (1990) as well as various discs from other Time-Life series. There's a handful of songs we skip on Hearts In Motion but find it a great listen overall ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

On My Mind is the eighth volume in the Body Talk series and, like the first six volumes, has no credited mastering engineer. Consistently strong playlist from top to bottom including Smokey Robinson's seminal "Quiet Storm" earns On My Mind a rating of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

The ninth and final volume in Body Talk's initial year is Magic Moments. They spelled J.D. Souther's name correctly this time and managed to put together another strong playlist with only a couple of songs that usually make me reach for the skip button. Solid ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

Let us know if you have any favorite tracklistings thus far with a Comment then join us next time for the 1997 releases in the Body Talk series.