Basia - Time and Tide (1987)

I loved the song Time and Tide from the first time I heard it on MTV, so I went out and bought the CD - no small investment for a broke college student back in 1988. The writing is decent fluff jazz/pop; critic William Ruhlmann from Allmusic writes, "So what if there's no musical substance to speak of, no emotional connection to the singing? That's like saying whipped cream has no nutritional content. Right, but who doesn't like it?" Agreed, but two things bother me now about this CD that didn't bother me much in the late '80s. First, Basia's voice, while certainly exotic, is incredibly annoying in the mid to upper register. It's like she's yelling at you through her nose. Her lower voice is quite smooth and controlled, unfortunately, she and her musical partner Danny White don't seem to hear this. Second, the synth bass, which was commonplace in the late '80s, is now distracting to my ear, particularly because it is so close in the mix. But like I said, I didn't notice these things at the time, so this got a lot of playing time in my car in the fall of '88. I was enough of a fan to buy the follow-up, 1989's London Warsaw New York, before moving on to other things.

Album chart peaks:

• US Billboard Top 200: #36 (Nov 26, 1988)
• Billboard Pop CD: #18
• Rolling Stone: #21

Tracks: The title track remains the best song on the disc. It also sounds like nothing else on the disc. However, the songs Promises, From Now On, New Day For You are all good, too. I remember grooving to the psuedo-Latin beat of Freeze Thaw (think Miami Sound Machine), but now that I'm more familiar with actual Afro-Cuban music, it just upsets me to listen to something so derivative. Perfect for your Jazzercise class, though. You can skip that one along with Prime Time TV and How Dare You.

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Personal Memory Associated with this CD: In the fall of '88, I was student teaching in the Dallas area. I had about an 45 minute commute along Campbell Rd from North Dallas to Richardson. This was one of the CDs that kept me company on that drive. I had one of those early portable CD players with a cassette player adapter (Sony D-160, below). What a pain that was. My roommate at the time (a former teacher of mine, but that's another story for another time), came home one day when I had this CD playing and thought it was so irritating that she insisted that I turn it off. I was irked at the time, but it turns out she had a good ear after all.