Melissa Manchester’s Latest Single a Newly Reimagined Recording of her Early Hit “JUST YOU AND I” Is Out! – Music News
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First single from 24th album RE:VIEW available now
RE:VIEW album to be released as monthly singles
Melissa Manchester / Carole Bayer Sager classic shines brighter than ever with the addition of Gerald Albright, Citrus Singers
Stream “Just You And I!” music video
“It’s not so much that people come to see an artist to learn something,” insists Grammy Award-winning, multi Academy Award-nominated, Melissa Manchester, “as much as it is to be reminded of who they are.” She should know. She’s been doing this for a while now.
Even as the seminal classic hit, “Just You And I,” – reborn as the first single of Manchester’s 24th album, RE:VIEW – turns 44 this year, it’s reminding music lovers who they are, and who they were back in the day. It also reminds the listener of what a great singer/songwriter Manchester was – and still is – partly because her instrument has deepened and strengthened with maturity and partly because the song’s message is more timely today than ever.
“Right now,” Manchester explains, “as we celebrate Labor Day, it seemed so fitting to release “Just You And I” in tribute to the first responders, the essential workers and the everyday heroes who labor, every day, to keep the world running and to keep everyone safe.”
Originally charting in February 1976, “Just You and I” arose from a conversation between its co-writers, Melissa Manchester and Carole Bayer Sager. “We wrote together as young women in New York City, every day, in my tiny little apartment or her tiny little apartment,” Manchester reminisces. “It’s what you did.”
Considering the veteran artist has always “not been interested in being current so much as being timeless,” it should come as no surprise that the message of “Just You And I” sounds like it erupted from last week’s headlines:
“When your heroes go up in a puff
And there’s not enough to hang onto
And the ones you would count on to call
They all fall down all around you
Then you’ve got to believe there’s more
It is the reason we’re put here for
There’s just you and I
When the legend’s over and we have just begun
We can look to each other to see us through
Just you and I”
For this latest reinvention of the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary Top 5 (No. 3) charter, “I had the opportunity to invite a new generation of young artists – the instrumentalists and singers of Citrus Community College in Glendora, CA (where I’m proud to be the Artist In Residence) – to join me in revisiting and bringing new energy to the song,” Manchester exudes. “They’re singing on “Just You And I” – that’s the choir! I wrote the parts and, boy, they showed up!”
The rhythm section and choir vocals were recorded in the state-of-the-art Citrus College Studios in early 2020, before the campus was shut down due to the worldwide health crisis. When the global Covid-19 pandemic hit, Manchester admits, “I was feeling a lot of grief because I missed my life! Because being home always meant I was between gigs.”
Upon reflection, however, Manchester realized that she had most of the new RE:VIEW album “in the can” – already recorded during the previous several months – so it might be possible to complete the collection remotely. Further, as 2020 unfolded, it seemed like “Just You And I” was a song whose time had come … again. So, she enlisted the help of her longtime friend and eight-time GRAMMY® Award-nominated jazz great, saxophonist Gerald Albright, to bring a fresh twist to the album’s first single.
“Gerald and I both know that he played on one of my early songs – I love how he plays – but neither of us can remember what the song was!” Manchester laughs. “So, we just had to do it again!”
The idea for the new album project bubbled up in 2019. “The whole point of RE:VIEW,” explains Manchester, “is that, in these times, as with many of my colleagues, the original record company owns all of the masters, and the only way I can empower myself and own my masters is to re-record these old songs, with a little bit of a tweak, just to make it interesting.”
“You grow into the songs,” Manchester continues. “You start to, you know, mess with the harmonics a little bit. So that’s what we are doing.”
The full RE:VIEW album will feature eight more of Manchester’s charted hit songs from the 70s and 80s – songs like “Through The Eyes Of Love” and “Midnight Blue” – as can only be re-envisioned through the lens of an artist with an enduring career. One of that rarified New York crowd of singer/songwriters that included the likes of Carole King, Barry Manilow, Laura Nyro and Billy Joel, Manchester is also including a few surprises as she considers her fifty years in the music industry, including one of her compositions that was originally released by Diana Ross, but which Manchester, herself, never recorded. Other selections are never-released songs she’s penned which have finally met their moment.
The full RE:VIEW album will be revealed song by song, month by month, a bright spot to look forward to along the path out of a dark year.
No stranger to musical activism, Manchester released the poignant music video “A Better Rainbow,” in 2018 as a get-out-the-vote effort, featuring images contributed by fans from around the globe. More recently, she ventured into the world of contemporary choral writing and recording with the virtual choir anthem “Awake!,” based on a century-old poem by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
In support of women’s empowerment, Manchester composed the score to the hit musical, Sweet Potato Queens, with book by Broadway veteran Rupert Holmes and lyrics by Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Sharon Vaughn, based upon the New York Times best selling books of Jill Conner Browne,
In 1980, Melissa Manchester became the first recording artist in the history of the ACADEMY® Awards to have two nominated movie themes in a single year – “Through The Eyes Of Love” from Ice Castles and “I’ll Never Say Goodbye” from The Promise – and to perform them both on the Oscar telecast. Manchester starred in the national tours of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music Of The Night and Song And Dance, and she created the role of Maddy, the title character’s mother, on the NBC hit TV series Blossom.
Nominated for a GRAMMY® in 1980 for “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” Manchester won the award for best female vocalist in 1982 singing “You Should Hear How She Talks About You.”
“Just You And I!” is available now:
SoundCloud HERE
YouTube HERE
iTunes HERE
And at all of the major online music distributors.
Visit Melissa’s website
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