There are singers who can sell a lyric, and there are singers who make you wonder if the lyric was written about them personally — Etta James at seventy-something sits firmly in the second category, and I’ll Take Romance is the record that proves it still held true in 2003.
This was her standards album, which should tell you nothing surprising and yet everything important. By the time she walked into Capitol Studios in Hollywood to make it, James had already spent fifty years turning other people’s songs into confessions. Producer Barry Manilow — yes, that Barry Manilow, and no, don’t let it put you off — understood that the job here was not to modernize her. The job was to get out of her way.
The Room She Walked Into
Manilow arranged the whole thing for a live orchestra, and the sessions were recorded largely to two-track, old-school, with everyone in the room together. That decision shows up in the music. You can hear the air moving.
Dave Grusin was an early touchstone for how Manilow was thinking about the orchestrations — lush but never syrupy, strings used for warmth rather than decoration. The rhythm section locked in tight and then went quiet whenever James needed space, which was often.
The session players were the kind of Los Angeles studio elite who can follow a singer’s breath. Bass, brushed drums, quiet piano — the band functioned less like an ensemble and more like a listening ear.
What She Does to These Songs
The title track, a 1937 Oscar Hammerstein II and Ben Oakland number, gets treated like it was written last Tuesday. James doesn’t revere these melodies; she inhabits them.
“At Last” is here, of course. She’d been recording and performing that song since 1960, and by this point in her life she had stopped performing it and started living inside it during the three and a half minutes it takes to get through. The version on this record has a gravity that earlier takes don’t quite carry.
“Imagination” is the one I keep going back to. Jimmy Van Heusen’s melody sits high in the voice and James takes it slow, slower than you’d think the song could bear, and it holds.
There’s a version of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” where she sounds like she’s conducting a private argument with the air. It’s a minor thing that becomes a major thing by the end.
I’ll admit I came to this record skeptically. A Manilow-produced standards album for an R&B legend in her mid-sixties felt like it had the words late-career obligation stamped on the cover. It does not. This is a record about what happens when a singer has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Just the Voice
The engineering on this record deserves a mention. The vocal sits in the mix at a distance that feels natural — not pinned to your forehead like a modern pop record, but present the way a singer is present when they’re in the same room. Whatever microphone they put in front of James, it was the right one.
She sounds like someone who has been singing longer than most musicians have been alive and who has simply gotten better at all of it. The phrasing on the slower ballads is a masterclass in what rubato actually means in practice — not slowing down arbitrarily, but letting the time breathe exactly where the feeling requires it.
I’ll Take Romance didn’t make a lot of noise when it came out. It didn’t need to.