True Love Ways belongs to a rather long list of albums featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra overdubbed on classic recordings by beloved artists. It's the worst of the batch. Part of the problem with True Love Ways is that Buddy Holly and his band the Crickets were idiosyncratic, lively players whose recordings do not lend themselves to the square, sticky sounds of the Philharmonic. One of the ways to fix this is to straighten out the quirks in the editing, replacing the raw Crickets with studio players, then glop on layer after layer of strings. Holly's material has been subjected to such a treatment before, with his last demos overdubbed not long after his death, and his last studio sessions were laced with strings arranged by Dick Jacobs, but the existence of those cuts puts the lie to True Love Ways. In their original versions, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" and "Raining in My Heart" were draped in strings, but they followed the rhythms laid down by Holly. Here, everything is in service to the melody, which means there is no swing, no rock & roll, not even a trace of sweet pop. It's all middlebrow nonsense, the kind of thing Buddy Holly's music opposed back in the 1950s.