492. Bobby Womack - The Poet (1981)




















Track Listing

1. So Many Sides Of You
2. Lay Your Lovin' On Me
3. Secrets
4. Just My Imagination
5. Stand Up
6. Games
7. If You Think You're Lonely Now
8. Where Do We Go From Here

Review

I am quite torn on this album, the first time I heard it it just felt like such a throwback to the great albums of Marvin Gaye like Let's Get It On that I was kind of disliking it for its lack of innovation or having anything new to say.

Innovation is not what all albums live off, however and a few days later the album has actually grown on me, it is quite a competent Jazz/R&B mix that is here, the songs are appropriately catchy and summery as they should be, and the album has no pretensions, but that is all right by me.

In the end Bobby Womack's The Poet came out 6 or 7 years too late for its own good, but it is still a very enjoyable album, and a very competent one as well, if only it hadn't suffered by such shit timing, the contrast with what surrounds it is just too great to consider it much more than a throwback, but it is still good.

Track Highlights

1. If You Think You're Lonely Now
2. Just My Imagination
3. So Many Sides Of You
4. Stand Up

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Bobby Womack's 1981 album The Poet was a surprise hit and contained the hit single "If You Think You're Lonely Now." K-Ci Hailey, a notable admirer of Womack's work, covered "If You Think You're Lonely Now" in 1994. The song is referenced in Mariah Carey's song "We Belong Together", a number-one hit in June 2005. Carey sings "I can't sleep at night / When you are on my mind / Bobby Womack's on the radio / Singing to me: 'If you think you're lonely now.'"

If You Think You're Lonely Now, with a very feeble Richard Pryor in the audience: