Born To Wander is subtitled Tende and Soulful Ballads (Folk Flavoured) but has little to do with folk music. More mellow pop music really. The album is super-smooth and the harmonies blens flawlessly throughout. The one most people will be familiar with is Silence is Golden, a perennial favourite. The rest of the album is as classy as it is smooth....
Dawn (Go Away) & 11 Other Great Songs follows a certain trend in titles that you may just have noticed by now. Apart from a couple of originals including the No 3 chart success Dawn most of these tracks are covers of recent hit material, from You Send Me, Sixteen Candles, Do You Want To Dance, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.....all given the Four Seasons treatment. When Dawn was No 3 in the US Singles chart, The Beates were at 1, 2, 4 and 5....This album was recorded to have a "rough edge" to it, and the group could have performed all of this just as it is on stage. Many of the songs they did just that. Producer Bob Crewe is quoted as saying that not all the roughness survived the engineers smoothing things out a bit, but enough remains. Not my favourite album, it sounds too bleak to me, but nonetheless quite a bit of stuff that I like.
