Originally Posted by
sup_fan
my thoughts on the failure of Touch:
1. the eerie creepy intro - are we walking into a haunted house? is that solo snare drum signaling our walk to the guillotine?
2. extremely poor single version. the sound quality on the 45 sucks. the edits are not smooth, the mix is terrible.
3. jean's vocals sound a bit strained. most of her lines are in her upper register so you never get the natural rise and fall of her voice as you do on a song like This Is the Story. meanwhile you have mary's misty vocals next to this more sharp sounding soprano of jean. isn't as successful a vocal pairing as FJ or Auto sun
4. just not strong enough of a song to follow NJ. I sort of pin the "problems" with the supremes starting with NJ, at least in the US. that song should have done MUCH MUCH better. it was on the charts for 10 weeks which is ok. it rose relatively well through week 4 and then sort of petered out. 88-57-40-27-21-19-16-16-18-27. so it's like it started out pretty hot but ran out of gas. we all count it as a hit but a peak of 16 is not stellar, at least for The Supremes. had it been a massive hit, maybe touch could have charted better. But it's like the public at first was captivated by the unusual and cool NJ but then got distracted and wandered off, forgetting about the girls. Touch was a casualty of this.
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