Ellie Greenwich: I Can Hear Music: The Ellie Greenwich Collection

You may not immediately know the name Ellie Greenwich, but you know Ellie Greenwich. Alone and with others, most frequently husband Jeff Barry, Greenwich is responsible for some of the most enduring songs of the early '60s, including such Phil Spector-produced classics as "Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry," "Be My Baby," "Then He Kissed Me," and "Chapel Of Love," as well as a number of hits for The Shangri-Las, including "Leader Of The Pack." But like many songwriters working in the Brill Building era of hits by the pound, and particularly women from that period, Greenwich didn't get her due in her time. Her talents not limited to songwriting, Greenwich also performed and produced, working most notably in the latter capacity as the mind behind Neil Diamond's early hits. As a performer, she never quite made it, and as this collection of her recordings makes clear, that's too bad. Prior to her split with Barry, Greenwich was half of The Raindrops, achieving a minor hit with the 1963 single "The Kind Of Boy You Can't Forget," but the song was the closest she came to success as a recording artist. Fortunately, I Can Hear Music recovers the career that might have been. Greenwich's collaboration with Shangri-Las producer Shadow Morton, "You Don't Know," deserves mention as one of the decade's great lost singles, and the tracks excerpted from her 1967 solo album, the descriptively titled Ellie Greenwich Composes, Produces & Sings, suggests that, had her songwriting not gone out of style after Sgt. Pepper, she could have been a star in her own right. But it was the failure of 1973's Let It Be Written, Let It Be Sung… that caused Greenwich to pack it in, at least for a while. Long out of print, Let It Be Written, based on the nine tracks included here, is at least as compelling as Greenwich contemporary Carole King's Tapestry. Sometimes radically, sometimes schmaltzily, but usually enjoyably re-imagining Greenwich's hits, the album should have found a place alongside the most successful works of The Carpenters; "Wait 'Til My Bobby Gets Home," for instance, takes on new resonance in the waning days of the Vietnam War. It wasn't to be; Greenwich the performer didn't get the spotlight then, but I Can Hear Music deservedly, if belatedly, shines it on her now.