Whispers: Lounge Originals (Various Artists)

Includes letterpressed heavyweight matchbook-style jacket with screenprinted strike strip, debossed inner sleeve, and a 22" square fold-out matchbook gallery poster. A lounge in the Poconos located just inside a Holiday Inn, 1973. The smoky haze clears to reveal a middle aged couple on a one-foot high stage, prattling on about the weather or Watergate before launching into a serviceable cover of Burt Bacharach's "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" Tens of thousands of such combos littered restaurants, cruise ships, casinos, lobbies, and cocktail bars throughout the '60s and '70s, but far fewer cut a record worth buying from the stage, much less listening to on the home hi-fi. Gathered here are 14 lounge originals from across the entire easy listening spectrum. A spent matchbook's worth of crooners, bossa nobodies, seafood jazzers, and Donca-Matic enthusiasts all in search for their ticket out of a red leather booth hell.