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The first time we slid This Time into the CD player, we did a double take on the PCH. We were sure it had to be Harry Nilsson, or his ghost—or at least what Harry Nilsson would have sounded like had he kept his boozing in check and taken enough care of himself to make it this far. And it turns out the similarity is not entirely coincidental. The artist was a friend of Harry, born about ten months earlier, who calls himself M. Richard Monda.
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(And dig this: He also appeared in a 1989 cinematic work called Oversexed Rugsucker from Mars, which Joe Bob Briggs hailed as “a serious examination of what exactly would happen if three drunk six-inch-high Martians landed on earth, climbed inside a vacuum cleaner bag, and electronically mated with a street bum,” and whose writer-director contributes a song to This Time. We don’t make this shit up.)
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This is LA music that brings in a little Michael Franks, a dash of Mark Murphy and a kinship to Charlie Haden's Haunted Heart, but fits securely in the tradition of the grown-up, stripped-down weary pop perfected by Harry Nilsson and Dennis Wilson too long ago. So intimate that much of it is sung in a whisper, This Time is the sound of a polished pop craftsman putting aside the trappings and looking back, just as Leiber & Stoller did with Peggy Lee—and it turns out that track we mistook for Harry Nilsson was “It’s A Good Day,” an old one written by Peggy Lee, and it’s reprised at the end the CD with backing vocals by Mark Hudson as a “Tribute to Harry Nilsson.”
In between is a mix of Monda originals and standards like Blues In the Night: songs about love lost, wrong roads taken, cheating, loneliness, and in the title track, optimism that finally he’s gotten it right. Though he probably hasn’t. It seems a long way from Chick-A-Boom. Until you remember those lyrics:
Last night I had a crazy dream
About a chick in a black bikini
Oh, she looked so good
She couldn't be real
She must be a magic genie
But then she disappeared around the corner…
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