A Review by Geoffrey Himes

It's easy to imagine a teenage Pam Tillis holed up in her bedroom with her favorite Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt albums when her daddy Mel called her out to the living room to meet his Nashville buddies. Those two rooms might as well have been two different planets back in the early '70s, and Pam Tillis has struggled to make a connection between them ever since. She leaned too far toward rock on her 1983 Warner Bros. album and too far in the country direction on her 1991 comeback on Arista. Of course, it didn't help matters that she was singing largely indifferent material on those releases.
Fortunately, the times caugh up with her, and country-rock has once again become a commercially viable vehicle. Tillis truly found her own voice on last year's superb Sweetheart's Dance, that included both a Searchers song and a duet with her dad. Two Number One singles from that album gave her the clout to become her own producer (still a rarity for a female artist) on the follow-up, All of This Love, a collection of Music Row compositions given lush, pop treatments. For purists, this is the sound of country music going to hell in a handbasket, but for the rest of us it's sheer pleasure, Tillis-style. This is who she is: a 38-year-old woman who loves both a crackling snare drum and a lonesome fiddle, an ornate harmony and plain talk about broken hearts.
She co-wrote only two of the 10 songs (down from three last time), but she sounds more comfortable than ever. Her real strength isn't songwriting anyway; it's her instinct for melody and harmony. On hook-laden songs such as Walt Aldridge and JohnJarrard's "Deep Down" and Don Schlitz and Gerry House's "The River and the Highway," she holds out the key notes and allows them to fill with the humming resonance of her big voice. Unlike traditional country singers who put their voices way out in front, Tillis takes the pop approach of treating her voice as an instrument playing a part within the overall arrangement. What she sacrifices in dominance she gains in unified wholeness.
She redoes Bruce Hornsby's "Mandolin Rain" with an arrangement closer to the "bluegrass band" mentioned in the lyric (with Marty Stuart playing the mandolin), but still there's a pop fullness and fluidity to her vocal. She sings a Western swing arrangement of Russell Smith's "You Can't Have a Good Time Without Me," but there's a bit of Eastern swing in her jazzy singing. Women may not experience love any differently than men, but they sure express it differently, and female songwriters Kim Richey, Kim Carnes and Chapin Hartford give Tillis that perspective on the new album in the form of a few visual details and melodies that flow without restraints.
Along with Wynonna, Trisha Yearwood and Carlene Carter, Tillis is proving that the L.A. country-rock sound is not a betrayal of Nashville's values but rather a way for the women in town to slip out of old styles and old roles and try on new ones. In the process, they are putting that sound to uses Linda Ronstadt never dreamed of.

A Review by Joel Bernstein

With her latest release, Pam Tillis becomes only the second major female country singer to be sole producer of her own album. Of course, not a whole lot of male singers get to produce their own albums either, so it's less a matter of sexism than a "singer as hired gun" mentality. (Before you go crazy, the first female to do it was Gail Davies.). The important thing , now that she's producing her own albums, is that it doesn't seem to make much difference in the final product, which should be good news to most people. This is a typical Tillis variety pack, ranging from the robust single "Deep Down" to a lovely version of Bruce Hornsby's "Mandolin Rain" to the redneck silliness of "Betty's Got A Bass Boat." Nashville's leading Pun-dit is at it again with "Tequila Mockingbird. " This one, unlike her previous puns, is a gorgeous song that deserved a more serious title. In every other respect, tastefulness continues to be Tillis' trademark, and she's proven that she can put together a fine album on her own.

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