ONLY YOU by Garry Manuel
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Garry’s Cover for the single
This song will eventually be included on the album or EP called, TIMELESS. Why? Because the songs are timeless and all were recorded from about 1979 through 1982 (with possibly one exception.
ONLY YOU digs deep into the sadness felt when a relationship caves, where it seems regaining that love and trust has slipped into the darkness of loneliness and a sense of desperation. Garry’s vocal brings that unsettling awareness to the forefront.
Helping to deliver the effectiveness of the song’s stark sadness are longtime friends and Sunup members, Brian Soule on piano and Kerry Peterson playing bass. The drummer is David Accorso. Garry is responsible for the writing, vocals and acoustic and nylon string guitars. The recording engineer was Craig Fennessy, who Garry did many recordings with as a solo artist and with Sunup.
Unfortunately the sadness of the song goes beyond the tune itself, and also to the fact that Kerry and David are no longer with us. While many musicians are often a bit intimidated by the recording process, that never seemed to be the case with Kerry. He always seemed to carve out intricate and harmonic bass lines that strongly supported the song. Kerry’s dry sense of humor, warm personality, and bass prowess has been sorely missed.
David Accorso was a skillful drummer who really knew how to achieve the ideal sound from the drum set. Each time we utilized Dave’s talent on a session, he came in and immediately got to work fine tuning each drum to perfection. Back in the 70’s and 80’s it often seemed to take an eternity to have the drums tuned for a session, but Dave typically had things ready to go in 20 minutes or so. Dave performed and recorded with Don Potter, Julio Iglesias, and with the very talented and popular Rochester NY band, Saratoga.
Brian Soule’s piano playing was an understated evocation of the stark realities being delivered in the lyric content. The delicate background of the Oberheim that Brian adds, enhances the mood even more. His playing did not distract, but supported the fragile quality of the song. Even though this recording took place over 40 years ago, Brian and Garry have had a unique chemistry in the recording studio and in live performances.
You may be able to sense the comfort and confidence level in Garry’s vocal, which had to do with the qualities of the song, but even more so with the sense of ease that Craig provided as the recording engineer.
Another sidebar to the remastering process for this release has to do with transforming the tape to digital. The actual master recording had accidentally been tossed out. For whatever reason, the bass sound was thin, and the piano track was suffering a bit as well. Through an AI app, we were able to isolate most of the tracks, with the exception of the piano. In that process we were able to restore the full sound of Kerry’s bass. Garry’s son, Marshall (who is the recording engineer for the majority of his music currently), is an excellent digital editor and recording engineer worked on getting the song sonically back into shape. The piano was reshaped slightly, but there was leakage of other instrumentation on the track so Marshall was limited as to what was possible in that regard.
