After emerging in the Broadway musical Camelot,
Robert Goulet enjoyed considerable success on Columbia Records as a seller of LPs in the early '60s, but the label never managed to break a single that might have catapulted him to another level of popularity. When
the Beatles hit in 1964, his sales began to flag. Having released Without You in the late summer of 1964, Columbia did not have plans for a fall
Goulet LP, but plans changed when unexpectedly the one-off single "My Love, Forgive Me (Amore, Scusami)" took off for the Top 20, and the label quickly cobbled together a
My Love Forgive Me tie-in album. It doesn't quite qualify as a compilation, even though it contains tracks previously released as singles, such as the minor chart entry "What Kind of Fool Am I?." Actually, despite the haste with which it was assembled, the album is one of
Goulet's better collections. It includes other Anglicized foreign songs, such as "Just Say I Love Her (Dicitencello Vuie)" and
Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado)." Suddenly with this material,
Goulet seemed less like a fading middle-of-the-road pop singer and more like a potential competitor to the mop-topped hordes. As it turned out, his thunder was stolen by the British Invasion tagalongs
Tom Jones and
Engelbert Humperdinck over the next few years. But with the gold-selling, Top Five
My Love Forgive Me LP, he briefly looked like he might be back in the hunt. ~ William Ruhlmann