THE LINER NOTES

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Released quietly in May of 1970, and produced by husband and partner, songwriter Glenn Sutton, Lynn Anderson’s eleven-song debut on Columbia Records marks the first full-length production of what would become this musical partnership’s signature, Countrypolitan sound.

 

Legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer once said that great singers are not just reflections of the songs they sing, but the songs that influenced them.  ‘Stay There ‘Til I Get There’ is further evidence that Lynn Anderson’s artistry and feel for a lyric was influenced from far outside the writers’ rooms on Music Row; something Sutton knew immediately when he first heard her. While the album’s feet are planted squarely in country, Lynn’s vocal reach goes beyond, to the pop and folk worlds as well, showcasing not only her talent for interpretation, but Sutton’s gift in giving each an unmistakable ‘Nashville’ sound. The simply-layered arrangement of the Bee Gees classic, ‘Words’, is delivered with an innocence and vulnerability rarely felt in a Lynn Anderson vocal. That same innocence underscores her take on ‘Someday Soon’; folk legend Ian Tyson’s timeless story of a girl from the North Country who falls for a rodeo man, but it’s an innocence tempered with our knowledge that she knows this girl; knows her intimately.

 

If there is a theme to this eighth album, a common thread, it’s grounded in that sense of familiarity, that belief that Lynn Anderson is singing these stories from experience; that she knows each of these women whom love has changed in some fundamental way.  The waitress who’s accepted her flaws in Sutton and Billy Sherrill’s ‘Good’. The wife who knows she has a breaking point, but whose love is stronger than the pain she endures in Foster and Rice’s ‘When You Hurt Me More Than I Love You’. And the woman willing to take whatever steps necessary to save the love of her life in Glenn Sutton’s ‘I’d Run A Mile To You’.

 

‘Stay There ‘Til I Get There’ marks, in many ways, the beginning of Lynn Anderson’s career; a career that history will show had only just begun to ignite.

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J Buck Ford