Just Out of Reach: Rarities from Nashville

Big-band pop crooner Perry Como was one of the first singers to take full advantage of the television medium when it charged across America in the late '40s, and as a result, he was RCA Victor's sugar daddy cash cow through the mid-'50s, selling millions of records. By the middle of the 1960s, though, the musical landscape, thanks to the Beatles and the British Invasion, had changed incredibly. Como didn't change, though, even if he modernized his songbook on occasion with songs that fit his warm, laid-back delivery. He had an unexpected left-field hit with Don McLean's "And I Love You So" in 1973, a song produced in Nashville by none other than Chet Atkins. Como traveled to Music City to work on an album with Atkins, and this set collects tracks from those and related sessions. It's not really country, or honky tonk, or anything like that, although Como certainly knows what to do with a good country love ballad. It's really more like Perry Como takes his thing to Nashville and records, and since everything falls into that easy, natural vocal style that was his signature, he didn't really need to put on the boots and the big hat.