The Sea

This issue has gold labels with boxed word MONAURAL in red at the bottom. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., a subsidiary and licensee of Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. Made in U.S.A. Excerpts from the essay on the back of the sleeve: I've wanted to write this album for a long time. It seems like always. I remember trying several years ago in New York, then abandoning it when something else came up. In 1963 a trunk I had shipped from Naples to the island of Hydra was lost and with it notes I had made on a "Sea" album. And, more recently, a composer-arranger and a friend I had interested in "The Sea" waltzed off together to create their own such project. No matter. That lost, abandoned, or stolen Sea means nothing now. The words here are the ones I have lived with for the past several weeks, and, they remain for me important. [...] The voice belongs to a good friend. The name doesn't matter. It is more important that it is someone you might like to know, or someone you might like to have say to you the things that are being said here. I have made love and thought myself a lover by the sea. Caught cold from it. Nearly drowned in it once or twice and walked alone by it more often than I care to remember. I've known the seas off San Francisco and San Sebastian, Capri and Catalina, Mantauk and Majorca, Mexico and the North Atlantic, and I've loved them all. How much fun it was to write about the sea! How much fun it will be to write about it again. I am indebted to many people for the chance. Mostly Anita Kerr. Anita thinks like a man. Maybe because she is writing music in a man's world. But, she is as feminine as a rose. I have never seen her terrify her husband with tears or whip her musicians with words, still she commands the respect and love of both. Writer Stan Cornyn calls her the "Indira Ghandi" of the music world. She is that. And she is gentle, warm, and unbelievably pretty - like the music she writes. It is marvelous to know that I am not too young anymore (and not very old either) and that I'll be writing songs with Anita Kerr for a long, long time to come. I cross streets more carefully now. – ROD McKUEN, January 1967 Also from back of sleeve: Between the two of them, Anita Kerr and Rod McKuen are responsible for the sale of more than forty million popular records in the United States alone. She as an arranger for such artists as Perry Como, Floyd Cramer, Roy Orbison, Connie Francis, Al Hirt, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins, Eddy Arnold, Brook Benton, and Lorne Greene. McKuen as a songwriter whose material is sung and recorded by Andy Williams, Glenn Yarbrough, The Kingston Trio, Jack Jones, Henry Mancini, Pete Fountain, Billy Vaughn, Damita Jo, Jacques Brel, Judy Garland, The Smothers Brothers, and Vic Damone, among others.