There’s a copy of this record in maybe ten thousand garages right now, sleeved wrong, a little dusty, probably bought for “Lonely Boy” and never really listened to after that.
Put it on tonight. Really put it on.
What You Actually Bought
All This and Heaven Too came out in 1976 on Asylum Records, and Andrew Gold made it with the kind of casual virtuosity that tends to get mistaken for simplicity. He played most of it himself — guitars, bass, keyboards, drums — the way someone who grew up watching session pros work eventually stops waiting to be hired and just does the whole thing. His parents were Marni Nixon (the uncredited singing voice behind Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr in all the films) and composer Ernest Gold. The musical inheritance wasn’t metaphorical. It was structural.
Ken Ascher co-produced, and the sessions at Kendun Recorders in Burbank had the kind of relaxed confidence that comes from not needing to prove anything on your debut. Russ Kunkel, who by 1976 had already played on records by Carole King, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, sat in on drums for several tracks. When you get Russ Kunkel, you’re not filling a chair — you’re deciding what kind of record this is.
The engineering is where casual listens have probably been costing you. Listen to how the stereo image breathes on “Go Back Home.” There’s a guitar that appears at the left edge of the frame maybe twenty seconds in and doesn’t move for the whole track — it just sits there, patient, like someone holding a door open.
The Session Musician Problem
Gold gets slotted into soft rock, which is both accurate and useless. The production on this album is too precise for that category to hold it. The chord changes on “That’s Why I Love You” resolve in ways that are technically correct and emotionally unexpected at the same time — the kind of writing where you nod along casually and then suddenly realize you’ve been leaning forward for the last two minutes.
“Firefly” is the track you probably skipped. Don’t skip it tonight. The vocal arrangement in the chorus has a suspended quality that shouldn’t work at the tempo it’s running, and it absolutely does. This is the advantage of someone who grew up around Marni Nixon — you learn that the voice is an instrument with a range and a placement, not just a vehicle for lyrics.
The record has exactly one fault, and I’ll name it: the sequencing front-loads the strongest material, and the back half asks more of you. Most people bail around track seven. That’s where this revisit earns its keep.
Why Tonight
Because the kid is in bed and nothing is asking anything of you right now, which means you have twenty-eight minutes of actual listening time before the obligation of sleep reasserts itself.
Because there’s a kind of California studio craft from this exact window — 1975 to 1978, Burbank and Hollywood, that cluster of players who knew each other from Carole King sessions and Linda Ronstadt dates — that hasn’t been properly reappraised and probably won’t be in your lifetime.
Because “Lonely Boy” sounds different when you know the whole album. It sounds like a hit single that was written by someone who didn’t particularly need to write a hit single.
There’s a photograph of Gold from around this period, sitting at a piano in what looks like someone’s living room. He looks entirely unbothered. That’s the sound of this record — someone making something exactly as good as they wanted it to be, with no apparent anxiety about whether you’d notice.