Kenny Loggins: Celebrate Me Home : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As the ads for this album have so insistently pointed out, this first solo LP has been five years in coming. The last time Loggins set out to tackle such a project, ex-Poco member Jim Messina was assigned to production duties. Sittin' In, the album that resulted from the sessions—with Messina an equal partner in writing and performance—marked the launching of a new duo.

Now Phil Ramone and Bob James are handling the production chores and Loggins shares the writing credits with, among others, Jim Webb and Alan and Marilyn Bergman. As those names might suggest, Celebrate Me Home, at its best, is slickly professional in a very Hollywood way. Loggins emulates Stevie Wonder vocally (he lacks Wonder's heart), and James' pop/soul arrangements send the upbeat tracks on a merry, toe-tapping course. Unfortunately, Loggins too often tries to infuse with dramatic intensity songs whose lyrics simply collapse with the effort.

The overall effect is not unpleasant, and not at all unlike a movie soundtrack (though I dread to think what the film would be like). It tries to include elements of contemporary rock and soul in a middle-of-the-road setting that could be unobtrusively absorbed by the action on a screen.

More than anything, it is time for Loggins to look in new places for material, for he still has the ability to please. The innocence of "House at Pooh Corner" wouldn't work anymore even if he could re-create it, but there's nothing here of substance for the heart or the intellect.