Sometimes Late at Night

They Say...

Review by Joe Viglione, All Music Guide

"I Won't Break" opens the third solo album from Carole Bayer Sager. It is an amazing song by Sager, her former husband Burt Bacharach, and the late Peter Allen. The lyrics are perfect and direct, while they take this pop tune through twists and clever passages making it something very special. This album yielded Carole Bayer Sager her first Top 30 hit on her own, "Stronger Than Before," and it is a nice slice from this concept album which flows from song to song with no breaks in between. "Just Friends" picks up where "I Won't Break" left off, so much so that if you're not paying attention, you don't realize it's the next song. That isn't to say this material is redundant -- unlike the Ramones, Carole Bayer Sager will take her same formula and reinvent it. Michael Jackson shows up to co-produce and sing backing vocals on this song, and he doesn't get in the way. It's all very tasteful. "Tell Her" is different enough to change the mood a bit, while on "Somebody's Been Lying" the acoustic guitars of Tim May, Fred Tackett, and Lee Ritenour bring the album to a whole other place in the days prior to AAA radio. Credit is given to Joyce Bogart and her late husband Neil for the concept, and while fans would love to have an album with more of the songs Sager wrote for other artists from the Mindbenders to Carly Simon to Melissa Manchester and Neil Diamond, at least the latter two artists show up on this epic to perform, Diamond playing guitar on the beautiful song he co-wrote with the singer, "On the Way to the Sky," and Manchester on the title track. Side one ends with the stunning "You and Me (We Wanted It All," arranged by Marvin Hamlisch with the ending by Burt Bacharach. One has to marvel at Carole Bayer Sager's ex-husband Hamlisch working with her current-at-the-time husband Bacharach. Guess they don't take the sentiment of "Just Friends" seriously, the tune which states plainly "I don't think that you and me can just be friends." This album is really the Sgt. Pepper of singer/songwriter recordings. It is exhilarating from track to track -- "Sometimes Late at Night," the title track, is simply gorgeous and majestic. "You Don't Know Me" -- not the Ray Charles classic -- a new title by Bacharach and Sager, concludes the album along with a reprise of the title song. Why Barry Manilow, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Helen Reddy, Peter Lemongello, or even older middle-of-the-road stars Tony Bennett and Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme didn't have hits from this fountain of songs is a real question mark. While Carole King and Neil Sedaka enjoyed their own hits while others covered significant songs from their current albums simultaneously, it didn't happen for Sometimes Late at Night. This is a perfect vehicle for Dionne Warwick to recover and re-discover. "Wild Again," "Easy to Love Again" -- these are vital soft rock tunes that should have captured the charts, the epitome of '70s and '80s adult contemporary. "Sometimes Late at Night" is a classic of the genre and deserves a special place on the mantelpiece.