Why no adulation for Crystal Gayle? Personally, I have always semi-consciously loved her name, with its association of Dresden glassware spiraling through a tornado, or ice crystals blown over Nova Scotia. And on the cover of my album ("We Must Believe in Magic") Crystal wears a provoking Cubist 70s outfit — a polyester kimono, white dress sandals, and a bra (one strap slightly twisted). Her lengthy straight nearly-black hair dangles as she broodingly contemplates a floor of fallen rose petals.*
Crystal’s voice may be high and somewhat limited, but who else can force such laughter, regret, teasing sensuality and humanitarian empathy into a line like
Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies
?
How sad that capitalism manipulated her into making a hit song ("Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue") — the first on this album — then let her slide into gauzy obscurity! But today’s ever-curious Internet audience is poised to rediscover lost majesties of the 1970s, and here is one.
Click this link, if you dare:
http://www.myspace.com/crystalgayleofficial
And I had forgotten the exotic "We Must Believe in Magic" (the 10th and last song on the record) about the delirious idealism of space travel:
Mad is the captain of Alpha Centauri;
We must be out of our minds.
Still, we are shipmates bound for tomorrow,
And everyone here’s flying blind…
*Perhaps her gaze is averted so as not to reveal that her eyes are actually blue.