Aretha Franklin - Hold On, I'm Coming - Selected Best Tracks (1980-1982)

Earlier this year, the Aretha Franklin box set "Aretha" was released. It dealt with all parts of her musical career. I haven't been that big on the later part of her career, from the early 1980s until her death in 2018, and I'm still not. But the box set made me realize there was a lot of good music from her later career that I'd missed. So I used to have two stray tracks albums for the early 1980s to the end of her career. I'm revamped that, so I now have four albums for that time period. Two of them are new, and two are radically changed. Here's the first new one.

My main problem with later music from her is the bad production. This album deals with three years at the start of the 1980s, before the production really got bad, in my opinion. For this album, anything she did is fair game. I included "School Days" from her 1980 album "Aretha," "Hold On, I'm Coming" from her 1981 album "Love All the Hurt Away," and "Jump to It" and "It's Your Thing" from her 1982 album "Jump to It."

As you can see, that means a majority of the songs don't come from her studio albums. I think non-album tracks tended to not suffer from the usual production problems from that time period. Three of those songs are officially unreleased: a version of "Sweet Sixteen" with B. B. King, "God Bless the Child," and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" with blues legend Big Mama Thornton. All three of those come from TV show appearances, so the sound quality is pretty good.

Two more songs come from the "Aretha" box set: "Amazing Grace" and a duet version of "I Say a Little Prayer" with Dionne Warwick. Finally, "Think" was a hit for her in 1968, but I prefer this version from the "Blues Brothers" movie soundtrack, because the original version only has one iteration of the chorus, and this version has two.

This album is 41 minutes long.

If you're interested in this time period of her career and you've download the early 1980s stray tracks album "Freeway of Love" already, I highly, highly recommend you get the updated version I'm posting at the same time I post this. That album has been radically transformed, with most of the songs different than before. Here's the link to the revised "Freeway of Love":

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/08/aretha-franklin-freeway-of-love-various.html

01 Think [1980 Version] (Blues Brothers with Aretha Franklin)
02 School Days (Aretha Franklin)
03 Sweet Sixteen (Aretha Franklin & B. B. King)
04 Amazing Grace (Aretha Franklin)
05 God Bless the Child (Aretha Franklin)
06 Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out (Aretha Franklin & Big Mama Thornton)
07 I Say a Little Prayer (Dionne Warwick & Aretha Franklin)
08 Hold On, I'm Coming (Aretha Franklin)
09 Jump to It (Aretha Franklin)
10 It's Your Thing (Aretha Franklin)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15114694/ArethaF_1980-1982_HldOnComing_atse.zip.html

The cover uses a promotional photo from 1980.