“Certain things get clearer/In the rearview mirror,” sings Albert Hammond on “Looking Back,” a song deep into Body of Work, the first album of original material the veteran singer-songwriter has released in 18 years. A hitmaker who ceded the spotlight to his songs, Hammond built a catalog that could sustain a career without a need for new tunes. Save perhaps for “It Never Rains in Southern California,” a satiny smash from 1972 that was his only single to enter the Billboard Top Ten, all of Hammond’s tunes are best known as renditions by other artists. The Hollies turned “The Air That I Breathe” into a soft-rock perennial, Leo Sayer brought the ballad “When I Need” You” to the top of the charts in both the UK and U.S., and Whitney Houston chose “One Moment in Time” as her contribution to the 1988 Summer Olympics. The key title in Hammond’s catalog is “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” a collaboration with lyricist Hal David that became a global blockbuster when covered by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson in 1984. With one foot planted firmly in American corn and the other in cloying Continental sophistication, Iglesias and Nelson revealed Hammond’s grasp of the international language of schmaltz: His heightened sentimentality knows no borders.
Hammond is deliberately looking outward on Body of Work. He recorded the album in Nashville and Berlin, then reunited with his old songwriting partner John Bettis—who co-wrote “One Moment in Time” with him—to help him finish a surplus of ideas he developed during a particularly tumultuous time in his life. In the years leading up to the album, Hammond divorced his wife and struggled with vocal atrophy brought on by an immune disease. He responds to those trials by confronting the clamor of the modern world—albeit through the prism of a showbiz lifer who feels at home surrounded by high-end recording gear.
Relaxing into the comfort of studio craft, Hammond dabbles in a variety of styles, striking a note of insistent defiance with the arena rock of “Don’t Bother Me Babe” and relying upon his adult-contemporary skills for “Somebody’s Child”; he counters those unabashedly commercial plays with such gentle love tunes as “Bella Blue” and “Young Llewelyn,” whose narrative balladeering hearkens back to Hammond’s folk roots. An able, old-school professionalism flattens these shifts in tone and direction, helping the album glide unperturbed from one song to another. What cuts through the gloss are lyrical barbs, with Hammond taking potshots at “social addiction” and “Chinese phones” in full Boomer-yells-at-cloud mode; the cynicism of “The American Flag,” with its swipes at “the money brokers” and “the media… just propaganda clowns,” is more Roger Waters than Woody Guthrie.
Despite these occasionally acid undertones, Body of Work veers towards hopefulness, conveying a sunny disposition in its unrepentant slickness and offering a couple of welcome detours from its deliberately classy soft rock. “Like They Do Across the River” bops to a reconstituted Bo Diddley beat; the Beatlesque bounce of “Gonna Be Alright” is punctuated by an exhortation to “Fuck all night/Fuck all day”; “Looking Back” is incongruously draped in neon vaporwave trappings; and the acoustic blues of “Goodbye LA” ends the proceedings on an unexpectedly ramshackle note, warmer and looser than its predecessors. These lighthearted departures give Body of Work a needed pulse and also reveal the sense of anonymity inherent in Hammond’s universality; instead of sounding at home everywhere, it’s curiously rootless.
