Customer Reviews

2 [Vinyl]

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This is just beautiful folk from Hardin. Quite a bit more introspective than the earlier stuff, this contains some of Hardin's best, and best known material (such as "If I Were a Carpenter"). Here Hardin is moving away from blues phrasings, and toward jazzier phrasings. Hardin's guitar and beautiful voice are upfront, but he is also backed by drums, piano, vibraphone, bass, and some tasteful string arrangements. I would go as far as to say that this was probably Hardin's best studio album, and it was clearly leading up to his career-defining masterpiece, the live "3". I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for romantic folk sung from the heart. I do have to point out however, that this particular issue, on Lilac Records, only contains the original album, with no bonus tracks, and only clocks in at 22 minutes 50 seconds.

Hardin's second album opens with his most famous composition, "If I Were a Carpenter," which was subsequently taken into the top ten by Bobby Darin. Darin borrowed a great deal of his phrasing from Hardin's original, as he did for much of the folk-rock he recorded in the mid-60s. Hardin's version is more introspective and raw than Darin's, and while apparently too sparse for top-40 radio, its powers as both a song and a performance are still quite evident. By 1967 Hardin had moved with the times from his earlier blues works into folk-rock, and here into a slightly more mystical sound. The jazz phrasings that made Hardin sound like a passive take on Mose Allison are mostly gone (the ragtime "See Where You Are and Get Out," is one exception), giving way to a more pensive and introspective style that's often accompanied only by acoustic guitar and light rhythm. Tim Hardin 2 has been packaged here as straight-up reissue, but it's also been available as a two-fer with its followup, and as part of the complete Hang on to a Dream: The Verve Recordings. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]