American Girl (Juice Newton album)

Overview

Juice Newton began her recording career in 1975 but did not achieve major stardom until the release of her 1981 album Juice. The album was a crossover success and yielded three hit singles, "Angel of the Morning", "Queen of Hearts", and "The Sweetest Thing (I've Ever Known)". The last of these peaked at number one on the Billboard Country Chart. She followed Juice with Quiet Lies (1982), an album that brought her two more hits, "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard on Me" and "Break It to Me Gently", of which the latter earned her the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female. Newton's 1985 album Old Flame was her country breakthrough, spawning three number one hits "You Make Me Want to Make You Mine", "Hurt", and the duet with Eddie Rabbitt "Both to Each Other (Friends & Lovers)" and also three additional Top Ten hits: "Old Flame", "Cheap Love", and "What Can I Do with My Heart". After two more albums (Emotion and Ain't Gonna Cry) Newton concentrated more on concert performing.

Newton's albums Juice, Quiet Lies, Dirty Looks, and Old Flame had all been produced by Richard Landis. In 1997 Newton reunited with him for The Trouble With Angels, an album made up largely of new renditions of her earlier recordings. American Girl was released by Renaissance Records on October 12, 1999 and was made up of twelve songs recorded over a period of eight years (May 23, 1991 - July 29, 1999). In discussing the album and her career Newton stated:

I took quite a risk pulling back my career to concentrate on my family, but I've done some other things, book narration, and learned quite a bit about that. I've written some stories and with dot.com I may just put those out myself. Might as well. We have a great web page. [Doing this album was] quite an adventure. There's quite a variety of music on it. But I've always been that kind of artist, and there are pluses and minuses to that. But that's what I do.

Of the album's twelve songs one, "Red Blooded American Girl" was reused from The Trouble With Angels. The rest were all new recordings of songs added to Newton repertoire. One was a big band swing-style number, "Nightime Without You" that Newton also wrote. Among the remaining tracks were cover versions of songs made popular by other performers. These include Nanci Griffith's "Listen to the Radio", Roy Orbison's "Love Hurts", Tom Petty's "Keepin' Me Alive", Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", and Buck Owens' "There Goes My Love".

In her review of American Girl music critic Charlotte Dillon states:

On this album Juice Newton steps out with some new material for the first time in a number of years. Newton's husky voice puts an original touch to each tune, sure to please both new and old fans. An album worth having.