| The Shadow of Your Smile | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Johnny Mathis |
| Cover: | Mathis-Shadow.jpg |
| Released: | March 1966[1] |
| Recorded: |
|
| Length: | 33:59 |
| Label: | Mercury |
| Producer: | Don Rieber[3] |
| Prev Title: | The Sweetheart Tree |
| Prev Year: | 1965 |
| Next Title: | So Nice |
| Next Year: | 1966 |
The Shadow of Your Smile is an album by American pop singer Johnny Mathis, released in 1966 by Mercury Records.[1]
The album includes covers of the same two Beatles songs ("Michelle" and "Yesterday") that would be in stores one month later on an Andy Williams album of the same name. Mathis also tackled recent easy listening fare on this album ("A Taste of Honey", "Quiet Nights (Corcovado)") in addition to show tunes from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and West Side Story.
The Shadow of Your Smile was released on compact disc for the first time on November 6, 2012, as one of two albums on one CD, the second of the two being his previous LP, The Sweetheart Tree (1965).[4] Both were also included in Sony's Mathis box set The Complete Global Albums Collection, which was released on November 17, 2014.[5]
By early 1966, Mathis and fellow easy listening singers like Williams began to feel the effects of the British Invasion. In the liner notes for the 2012 reissue, James Ritz explained:
The Beatles had ushered in the era of the performer-songwriter; therefore, good songs just weren't getting past the artists who were recording them for their own releases. The result was a steady emergence of what in the industry became known as the "cover album", upon which songs that had achieved a certain level of popularity were recorded or "covered" by a number of artists and savored by their loyal fans.
Two of the Beatles' quieter numbers, "Michelle" and "Yesterday", were understandable choices to present to the Mathis audience, but he recalled that it was still not an easy fit: "'I wasn't quite sure how to go about it because their recordings were so minimalist as far as orchestrations and sounded perfect when they did it, but I found it difficult to repeat.'"[2]
It was the Mancini-Mercer tune "Moment to Moment", however, that stayed in the Mathis repertoire through the decades and was even performed for a phone-in fan on the A&E Network's 1998 Mathis concert Live by Request. In 2012, Mathis said, "'I used to perform it constantly, but now by the time I get to the end and some of those high notes, I can hardly pull it off anymore.'"[2]
The first single from the album, "On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)", debuted on Billboard magazine's list of the 40 most popular Easy Listening songs in the US a few months before the album's release, in the issue dated November 6, 1965, and made it to number 6 during a 15-week chart run.[6] In the meantime, it also spent two weeks on Billboards Hot 100 that began in the December 18 issue and included a peak position at number 98.[7] The Shadow of Your Smile had its first appearance on the magazine's Billboard 200 chart in the issue dated April 2, 1966,[8] and began a run of 45 weeks there, where it got as high as number nine.[9] This was Mathis' longest album chart run since Johnny's Mood in 1960 and the highest chart position an album of his had achieved since 1960's The Rhythms and Ballads of Broadway.[10]
Billboard proclaimed, "Another superb Mathis performance to delight his multitude of followers."[1] Upon the album's CD release, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote, "Not only is The Shadow of Your Smile one of Mathis's most popular records, it's one of his strongest."[4]
From the liner notes for The Complete Global Albums Collection:[3]
Technical