Dusty Springfield - Longing (1974)

'Longing' was to have been Dusty Springfield's second LP for the ABC Dunhill Records label, and her ninth studio album overall, and was recorded in New York and produced by Brooks Arthur, best known for his work as a sound engineer for Phil Spector and Bert Berns throughout most of the 1960's. The working title during the recording sessions was 'Elements', but it was later re-christened 'Longing', and was even given a catalogue number: DSD-50186, and advertised in the press as a forth-coming release. The sessions were fraught, however, with Dusty feeling uninvolved in her own work (owing partly to her own reported perfectionist tendencies), and at the same time suffering from self-esteem issues and problems with substance abuse, and so she abandoned the 'Longing' album altogether late in the year. This was her last attempt at recording an album for four years, finally returning to the music scene with the 1978 album 'It Begins Again', which included re-recordings of two of the 'Longing' songs, the Motown classic 'A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)', and Chi Coltrane's 'Turn Me Around'. Some of the tracks used incomplete or 'practice' vocals, done to enable a release of the album in any form; and 'Corner of the Sky' is one of these, with Dusty never actually singing a whole verse. However, in 2007 Petula Clark was recording an album of duets and wanted to sing with Dusty, and she chose this song to sing on, so her producer was able to complete the track with the two vocalists, and that is the version I've used here.  
Despite not being officially released, 'Longing' is generally considered by those who've heard the songs to contain some of Dusty's most critically acclaimed work, with Janis Ian and Melissa Manchester praising her versions of their songs. The album itself was quite short, so I've added on a German single from the same year, as although the song was originally recorded some years earlier it seemed to fit perfectly with the rest of the album, and as a bonus I've tracked down the theme song to the TV series 'The Six Million Dollar Man', which Dusty recorded in 1974, and I've tried to stretch out the 45 second snippet to something that's worth hearing.

Track listing

01 Exclusively For Me
02 Beautiful Soul
03 Home To Myself
04 Angels
05 Corner Of The Sky
06 In the Winter
07 Make The Man Love Me
08 I Am Your Child
09 Turn Me Around
10 A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)
11 If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
12 The Six Million Dollar Man