Merle Haggard - Unforgettable

There's really nothing Merle Haggard can't do. His voice simply gets better with age. This disc of classic old standards & "torch songs" proves both these things, as he joins others who have shown that these songs also improve with age, growing more mellow & more classic each year, fine as vintage wine and true as gold.

I've never hidden the fact that I'm an unabashed Merle Haggard fan, and enjoy everything he takes a mind to record, from his staggeringly large collection of original works to this, his latest creation, a disc of twelve songs usually found in the "vocalist" sections of record stores sung by the likes of folks from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Mandy Patinkin and Michael Buble. It's been fashionable, lately, for genre-tripping artists to record in this style, from the sublime (Willie Nelson) to the bizarre (Rodd Stewart), but Merle doesn't give off the feeling of bandwagon-jumping with "Unforgettable." He's obviously singing these swinging big-band-style songs just because he wants to do so.

It doesn't surprise me that Merle can believably deliver songs like "As Time Goes By," "Pennies From Heaven," "Stardust," and "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You." Being a great songwriter, one of his own works, "What Love Can Do," is also right at home with the classics.

Merle is back at Capital Nashville/EMI with this recording, a label that produced most of his greatest hits. I don't know if a major label release is going to get any of these songs played on the radio, of course, but it's nice to see them taking a chance with an older artist and an unusual project like this one. (As a side note, it's the first time I've ever seen a recording come with a warning against LENDING it to anyone. That must make things difficult for libraries.) Anyway, it's good. Enjoy it.