Except for a single release of the title song from her film
Move Over, Darling,
Doris Day stayed away from the record racks for most of 1963, possibly dissatisfied with
Columbia Records' efforts to record and promote her with outdated concept albums of old
standards at the same time that she was the reigning queen of Hollywood. But in the winter of 1963-1964, she returned with her first new LP in more than a year,
Love Him!, and it represented a whole new approach. The producer was her 21-year-old son,
Terry Melcher, and he attempted to bring his mother's musical style up to date by banishing the silly concepts and carefully choosing contemporary material he thought would suit her. He got
Brill Building pop songwriters
Barry Mann and
Cynthia Weil to pen the title song, a
bolero in which a woman gives another woman advice on the man she has lost to her. And the rest of the material dated either from the last few years or had recently been revived. Thus, for example,
"Since I Fell for You" might be a 1948 copyright, but it had been a hit for
Lenny Welch in 1963. There were also songs associated with
Elvis Presley and appropriations from the
country and
R&B charts.
Melcher seemed to want to demonstrate that
Day could sing a broader range of material than
Columbia had been giving her, and she responded by throwing herself into performances of songs that had greater depth than those she usually sang. The approach didn't always work, but
Day sounded much more engaged than she had on previous albums. The disc made the charts, but sales were difficult to estimate; in
Billboard it just missed the Top 100, while in
Cash Box it climbed into the Top 40, a significant commercial comeback. ~ William Ruhlmann
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