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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Beth Nielsen Chapman
Look (Compass Records)
By Tom Geddie
Beth Nielsen Chapman’s new c.d. is a perfect companion for one of those overcast days when you see the one you love everywhere but in your arms. Look is filled with songs of love and lost souls and who we are when we’re blue.
Since the early 1990s, the Texas-born, much-traveled daughter of a career Air Force officer has been a regular adult-contemporary hitmaker for herself and for others, including Mary Chapin Carpenter, Amy Grant, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Martina McBride, Keb’ Mo’, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, and Trisha Yearwood. Her songs are featured in a dozen movie and tv soundtracks, including The Rookie, Message in a Bottle, Dawson’s Creek, ER, and Touched by an Angel.
Among highlights of the guitar-and-piano-based, radio-ready songs are the poetic “(You Will Always) Touch My Heart” and “Time Won’t Tell,” both dealing with unanswered questions.
Only toward the end — maybe this is just an accumulation of sentimentality — does Look begin to slip into actual darkness, as much in the arrangements as in the songs themselves. But it’s a pretty darkness, a place where we all, from time to time, play hide and seek with love. The versatile soprano Chapman and co-producer Peter Collins have created a fine vehicle for wallowing inside lost love for a while. — Tom Geddie
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