1967 studio album by Ray Charles
Ray Charles Invites You to Listen (sometimes referred to as Invites You to Listen or Listen) is a studio album by American recording artist Ray Charles, released in June 1967. Made up of several standards, the album had Charles experiment with falsetto. The album received mixed response from music critics, some noting that the style of music was "old fashioned".
Background and composition
As Charles' 1967 greatest hits album, A Man and His Soul, was released, he returned to the recording studio to begin work on Ray Charles Invites You to Listen. The album was produced by Joe Adams.
Charles used falsetto on the album "for no other reason than self-satisfaction". Ray Charles Invites You to Listen consists mostly of standards. Sid Feller chose ten songs for the album, and wrote their arrangements. A big band provided instrumentation for two of the songs, while the others were backed with fourteen string instruments, eight brass instruments, guitar, bass and drums; Feller conducted the strings, and Adams engineered the record. Ray Charles Invites You to Listen contains a cover version of The Beatles' "Yesterday"; Charles purposely recorded the song with a hoarse voice so that the title lyric sounded as "yeshh-terday". Charles also re-recorded Jule Styne's "People" with a trombone vamp.
Singles
"Yesterday" and "Here We Go Again" were released as singles in 1967.
Critical reception
Author Mike Evans wrote that Ray Charles Invites You to Listen is "one of the most remarkable recordings of his career". The use of falsetto received a mixed response from critics; it was called "grating and unpleasant" by DownBeat's Carol Sloane (who also described Feller's arrangements as "vapid," and Charles' performance on the whole as "lack[ing in] depth and feeling"),[6] while others praised its femininity.
