18 Yellow Roses

The title track of this 1963 LP was a Top Ten hit and a most worthy Darin foray into country-pop, bearing a slight similarity to Roy Orbison's early-'60s work. Both it and its lost gem of a B-side, "Not for Me" (which sounds rather like the Drifters' more dramatic early-'60s hits with an overlay of Phil Spector-ish production), were written by Darin and arranged by Jack Nitzsche. The good news is that both of those songs were on 18 Yellow Roses. The bad news is that the rest of the album was filled out by covers of then-contemporary rock, pop, folk, and country hits, none of them arranged by Nitzsche, and none of which rate among Darin's greatest interpretations. These range from decent (a jazzy "On Broadway," "The End of the World," "Our Day Will Come") to perfunctory ("Walk Right In," "Can't Get Used to Losing You," Dion's "Ruby Baby") to substandard ("I Will Follow Her," a gender-rearranged cover of Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him" that sounds more like a run-through than a finished track). One is left to lament that Darin did not do an album of his own material produced by Nitzsche (who, in fact, never worked with Darin except for the two aforementioned tracks), as otherwise 18 Yellow Roses sounds like a bit of a rush job rather than an artistic statement. In 2002, 18 Yellow Roses and another 1963 Darin album, You're the Reason I'm Living, were combined onto one CD by Exemplar Music.