The fine folks at Sony Legacy have remastered and released Cy Coleman‘s delightful 1967 debut vocal album: If My Friends Could See Me Now, Cy Coleman Sings His Own Big Hits With Orchestra. The set “was conceived on 52nd street, mulled over in Beverly Hills, rehearsed on the French Riviera and recorded in London. Credit Des Champ, Gordon Franks and Peter Jeffries – three distinguished British arrangers and pub crawlers – for the fine arrangements.”

“In an era where ‘singer-composer’ has often come to mean someone who finds himself in front of a microphone with nothing to sing and simply takes matters into his own hands, I’m hoping this album strikes a responsive chord among those of us who stubbornly measure the top-forty hit songs not by the week, but by the decade, or as in the case of one recalcitrant quite close to this writer, the half-century.” Edward Keibart (from the original liner notes). Hear, Hear!