(Olivia loved the album.) In Allison Anders’ 1992 drama Gas Food Lodging, Fairuza Balk is a small-town trailer-park kid who bonds with Donovan Leitch over Olivia’s Greatest Hits, Vol. Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John put her songbook in a new light Juliana’s “Make A Move On Me” is a real banger. She inspired a superb tribute 2018 album from indie-rock legend Juliana Hatfield, illustrating how Olivia gave so many shy Gen X girls a voice they could recognize as their own. When Olivia and John do “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” he’s is the one pleading he has to go home, while Olivia entices him to stay (“Gosh, Liv, I really do have to go,” “Been hoping, John, that you’d drop in”), until he finally shrugs, “Ugh, I’m stayin!” They also sing “Deck the Halls” with James Taylor and “Winter Wonderland” with Tony Bennett. Her best later album is This Christmas, an amazing 2012 set of holiday duets with John Travolta.
#OLIVIA NEWTON JOHN SONGS PLUS#
She recorded albums for Hallmark, plus a touching 1998 remake of “I Honestly Love You” with Babyface. She devoted her later years to philanthropy and family, along with her long, brave public battle with cancer, but she never abandoned music. But it blew up into one of the era’s most irresistible hits: Olivia’s growl, John Travolta’s wounded yelps, that massive bassline, and a repeat-the-chorus outro that goes on forever, yet somehow always ends too soon. “You’re the One That I Want” might have been a ringer - it had nothing to do with the Broadway musical or the Fifties concept. The Grease soundtrack album became its own pop-culture phenomenon - it was one of those hit albums that people just refuse to stop buying, right up to the end of the century. Like Sandy in the movie, Olivia got in touch with her bad-girl energy. Damn, country singers were mighty feisty about awards back then.)Īfter so many years as the most wholesome of pop singers, her Grease makeover in 1978 was a turning point. (The next year, the top CMA award went to John Denver when presenter Charlie Rich read the name from the envelope, he pulled out a lighter and burned it right there on the podium. George Jones and Tammy Wynette were so outraged, they organized other Nashville veterans in a CMA boycott and founded the “Association of Country Entertainers.” It didn’t last. She scored her first hit in 1971 covering Bob Dylan, of all people, “If Not For You,” soon followed by “Let Me Be There.” It was controversial when she won a country Grammy, but it was a flat-out scandal when this Aussie interloper won the Country Music Association award for Female Vocalist of the Year. Her first big splash came when she swerved into country music, in her long-running partnership with writer-producer John Farrar. Before fans invented the terminology of stars having “eras,” Olivia perfected the concept, because she hit every stop on the radio dial, from ingenue to Xanadu.
Olivia could hop from genre to genre, but she threw herself into every style with the same effervescent hyper-glitz enthusiasm, which is why she never sounded the least bit phony. Heavy-breathing rock odes to sex like “Magic” and “Make a Move On Me.” These are all reasons why we loved Olivia Newton-John - we honestly loved her - and that’s why pop connoisseurs are mourning for her today. Disco show tunes with Gene Kelly and ELO in Xanadu. But Olivia could do it all: weepy ballads like “I Honestly Love You,” country twang like “Let Me Be There,” Fifties pastiche in Grease. No Seventies star had a weirder pop trajectory, going from the world’s favorite Australian country singer to a brazen Eighties black-leather New Wave diva in just a few years.
Farewell, Olivia Newton-John, the eternally beloved pop queen who died Monday at age 73.
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