1. Just The Way You Look Tonight 2. Ruby 3. Anyone Can Whistle

4. You’re Nearer / If Ever I Would Leave You / My Funny Valentine

5. Fire and Rain 6. If I Remember You Right / I Had A King

7. Where’s That Rainbow / Spring Is Here / Falling In Love With Love

8. Bide-a-While 9. Violets 10. I Am A Town 11. How Deep Is The Ocean

12. Danny Boy

Produced by Betty Lynn Buckley and Kevin Duncan KO Productions: 0001-2

What is most different is how small and restrained everything is kept. We know just how Betty can belt, but here it’s almost as if we have accidentally discovered her singing quietly to herself. Only almost, however, for the singer’s intense desire to communicate her message of what she refers to as ‘oneness’ is too strong a feature of the work to suggest that she is only singing for herself.

In all but two of the songs, the accompaniment is provided by the enchanting piano playing of Kenny Werner, mostly delicate and unobtrusive but occasionally (as in the dark, brooding ‘Ruby’) weaving around the vocals to form an artistic sense of the ‘oneness’ already mentioned. Such classic songs from the American songbook as Kern’s ‘Just the Way You Look Tonight’ and Berlin’s ‘How Deep is the Ocean?’ are juxtaposed with more modern and in some cases less well-known items, James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘I had a King’, for example. Yet every song fits because Betty Buckley reinvents it as, in her words, a ‘contemporary art song’. There is a uniformity of pace and tone, a synthesising of disparate elements into a meaningful whole. Oneness, again.

This process of synthesis is at its most apparent in the medleys. In every case one song segues immediately into the next. Listen to how smoothly ‘My Funny Valentine’ moves back into ‘You’re Nearer’. In the middle of that particular grouping we catch just a fleeting glimpse of how this album might have been, as Buckley’s voice swells into the middle section of ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’, yet at that climactic moment its power is reigned in under perfect control. This seamless joining of songs in the medleys is simply exquisite in track 7, when the singer returns to ‘Spring is Here’ but the accompaniment continues from ‘Falling in Love with Love’. The grace and style with which this album has been created truly do justify the artist’s ‘art song’ claim.

If there is a highlight amidst so much uniformity of excellent material it is perhaps Mary Chapin Carpenter’s ‘I Am A Town’, in which Buckley creates a visual as well as an auditory masterpiece of understatement. Will she ever go back from this point or will she find that, in Joni Mitchell’s words, her keys don’t fit the door? Intriguing question. The next album should tell us the answer.