Whitney Houston's debut album - personnel...WOW!

[soulster]

Now, I have an engineer's mind when it comes to music, so I usually just check out the producer, engineers, and studio credits, listen to the quality, and leave it at that. But, today I was looking for the the specific type of keyboard used on "Saving All My Love" and came upon the allmusic page that gave a big, long, star-studded list of participants. I had no idea so many people played and sang on this album, and i've had it since it was first released in 1985.

I knew the album had three or four people like Tom Scott, Narada Michael Walden, and Jermaine Jackson on it...well, take a look: http://www.allmusic.com/album/whitney-houston-mw0000650265/credits

If this is common knowledge around here, OK, but like I said, I pay more attention to the technical stuff.

[Kamasu_Jr]

It's being reissued by Sony Japan this month and so is the follow-up Whitney. I don't remember the album listing a lot of credits.

[zebop]

Oh yeah, that album was going to be filled with some of the better studio talent of the day, no question. You can actually hear it, a lot of money went into that one.

As for the credits, I thought Roy Ayers was on the other Whitney LP, didn't know he was on this one. But yeah, a lot of great names, Randy Jackson, the Waters, John Barnes, Nathan East, etc. nice cross section of players. It's going to be a lot of folks due to the different producers.

What I had forgotten is that Jermaine Jackson got 3 production credits on the LP, Kashif got two.

[splanky]

soulster, that entry on allmusic is both misleading and in error. Look at it again. In listing
all of the people who in whatever way factored into an artist's release it makes it appear
they were present and directly responsible for the work you are holding in your hands.
When Whitney sang a Linda Creed song she made the credit though she probably was nowhere around at the time so you can eliminate most of the composers. Ditto for the hair and fashion stylists. Even if one was present what exactly did they contribute to the music?
Notice too that some of the names are repeated 2 even 3 times. Did it not occur to the
author that Julia Waters and Julia Tillman Waters might actually be the same person?
Ditto for David and David E. Williams. As for Executive Producer Clive Davis who loves to take more credit than he deserves, IMO, basically he was needed mostly to cut the checks!...
I see overkill like that on "ALL MUSIC" all the time....sometimes even the sketchy wikipedia
is more accurate...

[Kamasu_Jr]

Splank, I noticed some of the same things. I looked at the credit for LaLa Cope, it read "unknown." Most people know LaLa wrote You Give Good Love.