Folk-pop
singer/songwriter
Stephen Bishop
has bounced around from one record label to another, but he had his greatest success on the
ABC
label in the mid-'70s when he scored the Top 40
pop
hits
"Save It for a Rainy Day"
and
"On and On."
In fact, his two
LPs,
Careless
(1977) and the gold-certified
Bish
(1978), are his only ones to sell well enough to make the charts.
was absorbed into
MCA
, which is now part of
Universal
, the major label responsible for the
20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection
series of discount-priced best-of compilations, and the
Bishop
number draws heavily from those two albums, which provide nine of the 12 tracks. Unusually for the series, however, the compilers have licensed a track from outside
,
's chart-topping
adult contemporary
hit
"It Might Be You,"
the theme from the 1983 movie
Tootsie
, which is controlled by
Warner Brothers Records
. With that inclusion, all of
's Top 40
hits are featured, although a handful of other
hits, including
"Unfaithfully Yours (One Love)"
"Walking on Air,"
are missing. Still, this is the
most listeners remember, with his wispy tenor, shading into a falsetto, singing songs of romantic disappointment that boast strong hooks.
's theme for
National Lampoon's Animal House
, sung in falsetto and in a 1950s
doo wop
style, is uncharacteristic but enjoyable, while his own version of his song
"Separate Lives,"
a hit for
Phil Collins
Marilyn Martin
, is just about unrecognizable in its voice-and-acoustic-guitar arrangement, but sensitively performed. This is a good album for anyone who heard
"On and On"
on the radio, liked it, and wondered if its singer had more like it. He does. ~ William Ruhlmann