Despite producing two albums widely recognized as classics -- 1969's
Dusty in Memphis and 1970's
A Brand New Me --
Dusty Springfield's late '60s and early '70s were shrouded in confusion due to dual record contracts with Atlantic in the U.S. and Philips in the U.K. Theoretically, either label could draw from recordings made for the other label but, in practice, only Philips did this; Atlantic contented themselves with the aforementioned records, albums that are commonly seen as
Springfield's best, while Philips wound up cherry-picking tracks from these sessions and combining them with songs cut in London, resulting in records like From Dusty with Love that split the difference between two aesthetics. Real Gone's 2015
Come for a Dream: The U.K. Sessions 1970-1971 gathers 17 tracks intended for
Dusty's sequel to From Dusty with Love, many of which wound up on the 1972 album
See All Her Faces, a year after
Springfield departed London for Los Angeles and signed to ABC along the way. As the title to
See All Her Faces suggests, the material
Springfield recorded between 1970 and 1971 covered a great deal of ground, touching upon
Leon Russell's country heartbreaker "A Song for You,"
Goffin-
King's "Wasn't Born to Follow," a
Spike Milligan bossa nova that isn't a novelty and sounds as realized as the
Antonio Carlos Jobim title track, a bunch of middlebrow show tunes, a bit of smooth soul, an adaptation of Bach, and hard-hitting versions of two of Holland-Dozier-Holland's post-Motown projects ("Girls It Ain't Easy," "Crumbs Off the Table"). Collecting all this material on one CD instead of distilling it to an LP makes it no more coherent but that's fine, because it's easier to appreciate all the different styles
Dusty sang in these final days at Philips and, looking back on this period with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like a good way to go out. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine