DC Share Revival: Review: Melanie - Candles in the Rain (1970)

Rating: 90/100 - Genre: Songwriter, Hippie Folk.

Melanie’s Candles in the Rain unfolds like a set of intimate dispatches from a performer who has just learned how to hold a field of strangers with a single chord. Released in April 1970, the record was assembled at sessions that touched studios in London, New York and San Francisco, and was produced by her husband and manager Peter Schekeryk; it appeared on Buddah Records. What makes the album feel less like a conventional studio document and more like a set of postcards from a fragile, public awakening is the way the arrangements surround her voice — careful touches of organ, strings and a gospel chorus that gives several tracks an almost communal weight. The title single grew directly from an image she carried offstage after her appearance at Woodstock: the hillside lit by small flames and the current of people moving toward the stage; that moment fed the melody and the refrain of Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).

Born Melanie Anne Safka on February 3, 1947, in Queens, New York, she moved through Greenwich Village folk rooms and small clubs before the sudden, field-sized exposure of Woodstock, where she performed as a twenty-two-year-old and found in that audience an unexpected chorus. She continued to work with Schekeryk on and off throughout her career and remained an idiosyncratic presence on records and stages until her death on January 23, 2024.

The album opens with the brief, almost hymn-like Candles in the Rain, a prelude of acoustic guitar and a few sustained chords that establishes a weathered, reverent mood. It functions as a hinge: small, spare, a hand held out before the fuller surge to come. The piece prepares the ear — it is a breath in before the rush of the single, and in performance it reads as a quiet benediction, a domestic ritual distilled into a minute and a half.

When Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) blooms, the record’s central tension becomes plain: a singer-songwriter’s intimate phrasing set against an arrangement that seeks public catharsis. The single’s chorus is augmented by the presence of Edwin Hawkins Singers, whose call-and-response vocal lift transforms a fragile folk vocal into a widescreen exhortation; the piano and congas underpin that choir, and when Melanie’s lead slips into an upper register the sound is almost prophetic. The song’s origins at Woodstock give it an autobiographical charge — she translated a visual flash into a structural chorus — and the result is not anthemic in the stadium-rock sense but insistently communal: an acceptance of an audience as collaborator rather than passive receiver. The recorded version runs longer on certain issues of the album than on the single release.

Her cover of Carolina in My Mind sits next, and here the interpretative skill on display is as much in what is taken away as in what is added. Where the original leans on introspective, pastoral reflection, Melanie leans into an autumnal, slightly breathless tenderness; the arrangement favors organ and a sympathetic acoustic guitar, and she reshapes the phrase endings so that each line feels like an offering. The choice to include a song by another contemporary songwriter underscores her ear for sympathetic material and her ability to remap a well-known melody into her own tonal world.

Citiest People is one of the album’s sharper studio sketches: rhythmic, with an idiosyncratic piano figure and subtle string touches courtesy of Lee Holdridge on arrangements. The lyric sets people in motion through a series of observational slants, and Melanie’s delivery is at once amused and slightly estranged; she inhabits the persona of someone both inside and outside the urban circulation, the performance balancing clarity of phrase with a wavering vocal ornament that makes the chorus easy to hum but hard to mimic.

What Have They Done to My Song Ma is the album’s most plaintive domestic complaint — a slow-burning sequence of minor chords and a melody that sits, word by word, as if placed there with care. The arrangement reserves space for the lyric’s rhetorical questions, and the recording keeps the percussion low so that the song reads as a quiet grievance. That restraint is precisely its power: the vocal lines fold into themselves, and the listener becomes an accomplice in the song’s grieving arc.

Alexander Beetle (which credits an A. A. Milne accompaniment on some releases) is a compact, almost nursery-like vignette. Its brevity is an asset: it breaks the album’s midsection with a gentle, anecdotal moment that trades on charm and memory. The track recalls Melanie’s earlier folk club work in its simplicity, a reminder that her gifts include compression as much as melodrama.

The Good Guys moves the record back toward a wry tonal center. Mid-tempo and buoyed by a taut rhythmic foundation, the song lays out characters with economy and a slight edge of world-weariness in Melanie’s vowels. The production keeps the energy forward without aggressive percussion, and there’s a neat counterpoint between the chorus’s singable line and the more conversational verses.

Lovin’ Baby Girl is one of the longer tracks on the album and one of the more musically ambitious; it unfolds through a series of small dynamic turns, opening with a simple guitar pattern that blooms into string overlays and a push-and-pull between verse and chorus. The vocal performance is affectionate and unvarnished, and the arrangement gives the lyric room to breathe without resorting to ornament for its own sake. There’s a tenderness in the phrasing that reads as lived-in, as if these are not invented declarations but memories handed directly to the microphone.

Her reading of Ruby Tuesday — credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — is an intriguing interpretive choice that proved commercially astute in the United Kingdom. Melanie slows the tempo slightly and leans into the song’s wistful turns; strings and organ give the cover a cinematic sheen, but the production never swallows the lyric’s quiet ache.

The closing track, Leftover Wine, is the album’s emotional summit and longest track, a six-minute span that allows the singer to move through registers and moods. It reads as a confession and an offering: lines repeat not as redundancy but as a method of insistence, and the arrangement swells in ways that feel earned because the lyric has already prepared the listener for it. It is the sort of album conclave that allows the performer to unspool, to repeat a phrase until it achieves an almost liturgical cadence, and then to let it dissolve.

If the album’s production sometimes leans toward the polished, it is in service of presenting Melanie’s voice as a document of encounter: the record attempts to translate the spontaneity of festival communion and the quietness of club introspection into a format that a record buyer could keep at home. She was, in performance and in conversation, candid about how the Woodstock image — candles, movement, the close approach of listeners — shaped the record. In one interview she described the vision that came to her as she left the stage at Woodstock: “I had the anthemic part of that song in my head as I left [Woodstock]. I was seeing this hillside come toward me with this flickering light. It was a vision, an absolute vision of this flow of humanity coming toward me, and I was totally OK up there.”

Biographically, the album marks Melanie at a transition. She had the folk-club craft of phrasing and economy but now confronted the demands of larger audiences and radio formats. The record’s hits — especially the single — carried her into a broader marketplace and, for better or worse, into a role as a festival figure. She also navigated the business terrain with difficulty and candor across her life; interviews and later retrospectives show an artist who both benefited from and chafed against the machinery of record companies and management. Her ongoing partnership with Schekeryk shaped much of what came next, for better and less well, and the marriage of personal and professional loyalties is audible in a record that feels domestic even when it aims for the communal.

Listening to Candles in the Rain now, the pleasures are particular: the way the voice bends at micro-intervals, the unflashy use of strings to underline it, the strategic inclusion of covers that allow her to demonstrate interpretive range. The record avoids overstated studio flourishes, preferring small production gestures that amplify the emotional thrust of a lyric. There are moments where the arrangements inch toward sentiment, but Melanie’s vocal honesty — unafraid of breathy flaws or sudden lifts into a more urgent register — recalibrates those moments into feeling rather than spectacle.

The album’s catalogue of moods — benediction, communal call, private grievance, anecdote, tenderness — makes it a compact manual of early-’70s singer-songwriter practice, one that refuses easy classification. It is not simply a document of a seventies folk pop moment but a portrait of a singer translating public attention into songs that still speak in first person. The record’s best moves are those that preserve the sense that something was happening live: that a song is not an isolated artifact but an exchange, a small ritual that asks for a response. That impulse — to treat the listener as a living participant — is what keeps Candles in the Rain from settling into nostalgia; it still reads as an album made by an artist who believed that a song might alter the room in which it was sung.

If one fault is to be named, it is that the production sometimes smooths edges to favor radio-friendliness, a trade that softens some of the rawer club immediacy that made Melanie compelling on small stages. Yet that same smoothing permitted the album’s title single to reach listeners who would otherwise never have heard her voice. The record thus stands as an early instance of how an intimate singer-songwriter sensibility could be repackaged for a larger audience without losing the candid breathiness that defines the singer’s appeal.

You might also be interested in other Folk/Songwriter reviews I published on this blog:

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Review: Melanie - Candles in the Rain (1970)

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