Gather Me

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The only negative being the lyrics with Melanie at times, explaining what a great person she is, which can be a little irritating. But then, the "God stuff" keeps cropping up where you least expect it - not only in the album's coda (a song which may date from the 1900s), but implicitly in "Some Say I Got Devil" and "Railroad", and explicitly in "Center of the Circle", the longest of those seemingly-unfinished songs which fortunately is rescued by arranger Roger Kellaway - who unexpectedly converts it into a wild flight of fancy, a chamber-pop tour-de-force. Steppin' has a country feeling with its harmonica and piano and is a somewhat regretful break-up song with a determination to move on. Gather Me was Melanie's first album on the Neighborhood label which was founded by herself with her husband and manager Peter Schekeryk (to whom she stayed married until his death in 2010).

Buddah never did forgive Melanie for this and continued to dog her career by releasing old, in-the-can songs right around the time she'd release new songs on Neighborhood.Steppin'", which also sounds today like a pre-echo of Orton, and incidentally was the first "wronged-woman song" in her catalogue (if you overlook "Wait By the Water" and, indeed, "You Can Go Fishin'").

She enthused at the time that it was her best album yet (which should always be taken with a pinch of salt), and that it was the first album she was entirely happy with, and one that reflected exactly where her head was at, at the time! Some of her classics can be found on this as well, from “Ring the Living Bell” to “Some Say (I Got Devil), to name but 2 of the best of her work.When they signed Melanie they were high on Bubblegum Music, having struck gold in 1968 with groups like the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. The whole album presents a grown up Melanie with a interestingly wide range of material and the same intensity that marked her earlier albums and along with her sincerity was a defining characteristic.