Thanks to Elie, Kimmie and Catherine for the time and effort put into reviewing our album! Much appreciated, you guys.
A correction, a comment, and a question:
Correction, to Elie Landau's review: the arranger of "Fired" is Patrick Ardinger, not Chris Ardinger.
Comment: Re: Kimmie's review - "Bill (and this is subjective) occasionally oversteps his boundaries by creating patches of interestingness in no way offered by the singers themselves." In fact, the patches you're talking about were very much our idea - Magali and I, as the two group members present for mixing, approached Bill with a sort of proposed production vision for certain songs. In the case of "When Doves Cry," I actually re-arranged the song for the studio very much with that vision in mind - the extended bridge was conceived largely as you hear it on the CD before we got to Bill's. Not to say whether you should like or dislike the things we did with those tracks, but want to be clear that in this case, we asked him to "overstep his boundaries" - for example, with thunder and rain on "Every Time It Rains" and the "lost in space" motif of "Apologize" - in ways that, I still feel, enhance rather than distract from the songs.
Question, which I really hope doesn't sound whiny or defensive:
I see two main thrusts to the more negative comments in these reviews - 1. the soloists lack passion / emotional investment in their material, and 2. the material itself reflects questionable choices. Both fair criticisms. What I am VERY surprised by is to see an overall "Innovation / Creativity" score of 3 - and a 2 from Kimmie - on an album where I very much thought the innovation of the arrangements was its defining feature. As the most prolific arranger on this album, I made it an artistic goal to reinvent well-known songs like "When Doves Cry" and "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" as something utterly different - sort of genre experiments if you will. Even the less radical arrangements on the album, such as "No One" and "Apologize," change the character of their source material without overhauling it. I fully expected these arrangements to be a bit polarizing / "love it or hate it." But I'm very surprised to hear Kimmie mention "lackluster soloists and mediocre arrangements" in the same breath, without much detail as to what makes these arrangements mediocre. Flawed, certainly, but that comment almost sounds as if they're nondescript, which I guess puzzles me.
Kimmie, if you'd be willing to elaborate just a bit on what you found mediocre about the arrangements on "Yours Truly," I'd love a bit more illumination there. I'm sure you're busy and I realize you already volunteered your time to review the album, so if you can't that's fine. =)