2:00 AM Paradise Cafe is the fourteenth album by singer-songwriter Barry Manilow. The album was a radical departure from Manilow's previous work of highly polished pop. Manilow wrote in the liner notes that the record's concept came to him in a dream. Johnny Mercer's widow, Ginger, entrusted Manilow with a cache of Mercer's lyrics that had never been set to music. Although Manilow used only Mercer's "When October Goes" for the project, he created an album of all original songs with a torchy, smokey jazz style. He recruited veteran jazz musicians Bill Mays, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Mundell Lowe, and George Duvivier. Also enlisted for vocal duets were Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughan. The entire album was rehearsed for three days, then recorded entirely live (in one take) without overdubs at Westlake Studio 'C' in Los Angeles, California and released in 1984.
The album went platinum for Manilow, and peaked at #28 on the Billboard 200.
Read more about 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe: Personnel, Production
Famous quotes containing the words paradise and/or cafe:
“It is only for a little while, only occasionally, methinks, that we want a garden. Surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct floating islands, for the sake of a paradise. He enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill. Where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where Satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.”
—Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)