The Key - Fit Me In (1978)

Here's something that's a little unusual for me. Normally, I don't post studio albums unless I change them in some significant way. But in this case I'm going to post a studio album totally unchanged because A) it's really good and B) it's totally obscure. Plus, C) it's catchy, Beatlesque pop, and in these troubled coronavirus times, we all could use more music like that.

Instead of trying to explain what this album is like, I'm going to quote extensively from the allmusic.com review of it:

"For decades, the Key's 'Fit Me In' has been a lost treasure for fans of a certain strain of '70s AM pop. Think Paul McCartney and Wings, 10cc, Emitt Rhodes, the Korgis -- basically anything involving falsetto harmonies, chorused guitar effects, and an overall sense of languor and studio gloss. The Key were an Anglo-German duo of singer/songwriter Volker Langefeld (he of the breathy tenor vocals a la the Raspberries' Eric Carmen) and multi-instrumentalist Alan Warren, and their sole album was released in 1978, just a hair too late for the times. By the time this album was released, the new wave had overtaken the top of the pops, and a new band whose music sounded like the best Badfinger album ever made was, sadly, a couple years behind the time. In retrospect, however, the best songs on Fit Me In are astonishingly good examples of the form."

I especially like the comment about this sounding like the best Badfinger album ever made. The music is so good and catchy that it's a wonder to me that it had such little commercial success. Even now, it seems the band hasn't been rediscovered the way Big Star and the Plimsouls and other similar bands have been. I guess a lot of that has to do with the fact that they only ever released one album. That's a big puzzler for me: if they're as talented as they sound, what the heck did they do musically before or after this?! Apparently nothing, as far as I can tell. If anyone knows of more music either or both of them made, please let me know.

But also, as the allmusic.com review noted, this album came out in the wrong country (Germany) at the wrong time (1978). If they'd been a British band in the late 1960s, or an American band after the Knack and Cheap Trick briefly made power pop cool in 1979, they could have done much better. To make matters worse, I don't think they ever toured or did any promotion.

This album languished in (even more) obscurity until 2007, when it was released on CD with four bonus tracks. I've included the bonus tracks here too. They're some of the best songs, actually.

While looking up information about this album so I could post it, I stumbled across a social media post that has commentary by Volker, one of the two band members, about each song. Apparently, it was going to be part of the CD release, but was finished too late.  So I've added it in the zip download as a text file. Also, for the first releases of that CD, a little bit of one of the songs was accidentally cut off. But my version doesn't have that problem.

By the way, if any of you know of similar "lost albums" like this one, please let me, and the other people reading this blog, know. I find the vast majority of those don't live up to their hype. But every now and then, there's one, such as this one, that does.

01 The Farmer and the Fisherman (Key)
02 And the Rain (Key)
03 Pamela (Key)
04 Lazy Bird (Key)
05 Pretty Little Star (Key)
06 Old Fashioned Boogie (Key)
07 Half as Much (Key)
08 I'd Really Go for a Lady (Key)
09 That Game (Key)
10 Dragonmania (Key)
11 Fit Me In (Key)
12 Sometimes (Key)
13 Western People (Key)
14 Ba Uwa Mare Re (Key)
15 Until the Day (Key)
16 Should You Ever Meet Again (Key)
17 Cause You're a Lady (Key)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376782/THEKY1978FtMeIn_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I just used the official album cover, unchanged.