Quietly and with little fanfare, in 1976
Melanie made her strongest record in years.
Photograph was written over a number of years;
Melanie had been shoring up her strongest compositions and withholding them from her previous Neighborhood collections. Her new home at Atlantic brought in fresh players (many of the session musicians soon to be
Toto), and
the Edwin Hawkins Singers, who had made "Candles in the Rain" such a treat, were back on hand. But
Photograph was very much
Melanie's own victory -- her material was a revelation, and more sophisticated than anything she'd ever accomplished before. "Save Me" remains one of her finest pieces -- a fiery, feverish song with a mesmeric
David Campbell string arrangement. It puts her on a par with more respected peers like
Laura Nyro. "Cyclone" was another of her strongest musical ideas for a while, and a highly commercial one, too; in fact, there's barely a wasted moment on
Photograph, and it had more than enough potential to reassert
Melanie as an artistic force with which to be reckoned. But despite the endorsement of The New York Times, which placed it highly in a year's end best-album list,
Photograph faded before anyone caught a glimpse of it. ~ Charles Donovan