(Remember Me) I'm the One Who Loves You

By the summer of 1965, the formula arranger Ernie Freeman and producer Jimmy Bowen used to come up with hits for Dean Martin starting with "Everybody Loves Somebody" a year earlier — piano triplets, a 4/4 beat, swooping strings, a female chorus — had become so obvious that even the unsigned liner notes to his new album, named after his most recent hit, (Remember Me) I'm the One Who Loves You, referred to it as "the Formula." In fact, however, Bowen and Freeman were moving beyond the formula by this time, having developed for Martin what those same notes called "an updated pop-country sound." With the hits still coming ("Remember Me" was his fifth straight Top 40 entry), Martin was willing to let them do what they liked, and the team looked around for current material suitable to the singer and chose Roger Miller's "King of the Road," Jewel Akens' "The Birds and the Bees," and "Red Roses for a Blue Lady," the old Vaughn Monroe hit recently revived by Vic Dana. They also picked good vintage country and countrypolitan songs like Jim Reeves' "Welcome to My World," Ray Price's "My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You," Leroy Van Dyke's "Walk on By" (not to be confused with the Bacharach/David song that had been a hit for Dionne Warwick in 1964), Hank Williams' "Take These Chains From My Heart," and Dottie West's "Here Comes My Baby." Martin was fortunate to have a producer with such a broad knowledge of pop and country music and a sense of what would work for him. The country market never bit at these records, but Martin had a clutch of material that sounded fresh to pop fans. And, the liner notes notwithstanding, Bowen and Freeman knew that the time had come to vary the formula.