Shadow Dancing (album)

Recording

Gibb's second album was made under the direction of Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson, mostly while Barry, Robin and Maurice were off filming Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band up to January. Shadow Dancing was recorded from December 1977 to February 1978. Barry again was executive producer and was present during recording of a few of the songs. John Sambataro, who sang backing and harmony vocals on the non-Barry songs, plays slide guitar. Sambataro later worked with Dave Mason and McGuinn, Clark and Hillman and he later joined Firefall. "Why" has feature a slide guitar by John Sambataro, as well as the guitar work of Jock Bartley of Firefall, "I Go for You" features guitar work by Don Felder of Eagles.

Gibb also relied on Galuten's musical expertise to help translate his musical ideas into reality by co-writer or co-composer of some of his songs, as Gibb says "He'll sit down at the keyboards and find chords that we're hearing. He's magic. He hears exactly what you're hearing. 'One More Look at the Night' - that came across in 10 or 15 minutes".

In February 1978, Gibb participated on Stephen Stills' songs "You Can't Dance Alone" and "What's the Game" singing backing vocals along with Dave Mason, from the album Thoroughfare Gap and Gibb's band including Joey Murcia, George Perry, John Sambataro and Joe Lala also plays on both songs. (Back in 1976, Stills visited the Bee Gees recording Children of the World and played percussion on "You Should Be Dancing".)

Critical reception

Shadow Dancing contains four singles including the title track, written by Gibb and all three of his brothers, was released as a single in the US in April 1978 (alongside the album), and in mid-June began a seven-week run at #1, achieving platinum status. Two further top ten singles, "An Everlasting Love" (#5) and "(Our Love) Don't Throw it All Away" (#9), a song also released by his brothers in 1979, were extracted from the album, which became a million seller. Amy Hanson at Allmusic described "Fool for a Night" as a 'bittersweet, up tempo piece of pop', "Melody" as a 'wistful love song', and "I Go for You" as 'smarmy as it may be in hindsight, was still better than many of its contemporaries'.

Gibb, talking about his recently finished album, "I am so much more confident now after doing this second album, dealing with the pressures of proving to myself that the first one wasn't a fluke and that I could write a second album. So now I am a lot more confident". Following the release of Shadow Dancing, RSO arranged a mini-tour of Europe to promote the new album, with planned concerts in the UK as well as other European countries. The album was reissued by Spectrum Records in 1992 and Polydor Records in 1998. Rights to the album are now owned by the Bee Gees, and Reprise Records has made the album available through online music stores such as iTunes.

Track listing

All tracks written by Andy Gibb, except where noted.