Album Overnight Sensational by Sam Moore Review
Some sage told us years ago that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Overnight Sensational is an album with enough good intentions to choke a horse. Sam Moore was one of the great men of 1960's soul as half of Sam & Dave, but like his former partner Dave Prater (who passed on in 1988), once the duo broke up Moore had a hard time getting a solo career off the ground, and his star turned dim in the 1970s. There's no arguing that Sam Moore deserves a second shot at the spotlight, and his voice is still in fine shape, but his wife and manager, Joyce Moore, decided that the best way to relaunch Sam's career was to create an "event" album around him, with a name producer and a gaggle of guest stars. On Overnight Sensational, the name producer turns out to be Randy Jackson, a session musician best known as one of the judges on American Idol, and Jackson has saddled Moore with some very dubious choices in terms of material and duet partners (many of whom, judging from the credits, weren't even in the same room with Moore when they recorded their parts). If you ever dreamed of hearing Sam Moore sing songs made famous by Milli Vanilli, Garth Brooks, Seals & Crofts, and Conway Twitty, well, this is your lucky day, but while Moore gives each song his level best, the cheese factor on this album is woefully high, and the overly glossy production and soggy arrangements don't help the overcooked songs one bit. It's true that Moore has a long, rich tradition of singing with a partner, but Wynonna Judd, Paul Rodgers, Fantasia, and Zucchero blend with Moore about as well as oil mixes with water, with Mariah Carey's wordless melismatic wanderings on "It's Only Make Believe" slinking under the line as the album's low point. (Moore must have some spiritual tie to New Jersey, since Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi are the guests who come off best by a considerable margin.) Solomon Burke's superb 2002 album Don't Give Up on Me showed how a great soul singer could reinvent his talent for the 21st century and come up with a winner; Overnight Sensational rests on the other end of the scale, as the production, arrangements, and overwrought guest stars struggle to polish every bit of personality off of Moore's music, and the true marvel is that while it isn't a very good record, Sam comes off relatively unscathed (at very least, it doesn't sound like it's his fault). Someone please give Sam Moore the solid and straight-ahead R&B session he deserves instead of another all-star sausage next time out.Review by allmusic.com
