I don't think this album is quite as strong musically as
Hearts (but only by a small margin) but I really like this quad mix, which puts a lot of the harmonies - to me, America's signature trait - in the rear speakers.
When I was (to quote Billy Joel) an Angry Young Man, I had no time for what was (at the time) called 'Soft Rock.' As someone who at the time (early '90s) was listening to rap and then classic rock, R&B and funk, I wanted to feel like my music had integrity and a message, and having grown up in the era of the '80s power ballad, it seemed like soft rock had none of that, that it was just a series cloying, sentimental cliches strung together over some assembly-line chord change drama, like my beloved Chicago when they were under the spell of David Foster and Diane Warren in the mid-to-late '80s.
America is one of those bands I never would've explored back then (I liked Horse with No Name, but actually thought it was a Neil Young song as a kid) but which was brought into my musical orbit thanks to quad, and my breadth of taste is all the better for it. Bands like America and Bread (and David Gates, whose first solo album is a quad gem) really challenged those notions I had about the value of this type of music, and I've only grown to enjoy them more as I've matured (musically definitely, not sure about how much emotionally).
I could go on at length about this album, and while it does have a mild cheese-factor, I just put it down to the fact that the band wore its '60s influences on its collective sleeve, at a time when it wasn't entirely fashionable to do so, something I think is very admirable. Obviously this album has its hits, but for me the real stunners are the wistful, melancholic tunes like Hollywood and Old Man Took - I could listen to music like this all day long (and all night strong).
I also wanted to commend
@ForagingRhino for including the quad master tape box scans in the gatefold of the sleeve. If this album is a musical treasure, for someone interested in the history of quad, these two pictures are equally as valuable.
First off, these photos are the first visual confirmation (that I know of, anyway) of a completed quad mix out of George Martin's AIR Studios in London. I'd found mentions in trade magazines of the mid-'70s that AIR was quad equipped, but that's one thing, as many studios geared up for quad and then never got any work - confirming a completed mix is another.
Secondly, and more importantly (and interestingly) is the notation of the engineers that actually did the mix. I think I always presumed it was Geoff Emerick (given that he did the stereo mix, and there's no notation on the quad LP of any unique quad credits) but at the bottom of the master tape it's clearly denoted that the engineers were 'BILL PRICE / PETE H.', two heavy hitters in both engineering and production.
Bill Price had such a long career as an engineer (spanning from the mid-'60s when he started a Decca's West Hampstead studio) through the '90s that it's hard to pick out just a few albums from more than
600 credits, but they include landmark albums like
Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, The Clash's
London Calling, Guns 'n' Roses
Use Your Illusion, along with albums from Mott the Hoople, Camel, Caravan, The Strawbs, The Pretenders, and most of Pete Townshend's solo work, amongst many others.
"PETE H." is
Peter Henderson, who was just starting his career at this point, but who would go on to engineer some huge albums including Jeff Beck's
Wired,
Wings at the Speed of Sound, and others before moving into production, where he won a Grammy barely five years after doing this album, for Supertramp's
Breakfast in America. He's also responsible for the production on their
Paris live album and
Famous Last Words, along with Rush's
Grace Under Pressure, and more recently Paul McCartney's
Flaming Pie and
Flowers in the Dirt.
Anyway, as a student of the history of quad, absolutely fascinating stuff, especially for two guys who were never previously associated with the format. I love the fact that even 50 years after the fact there are still mysteries like this to be solved.
and well.. either there's something up with my disc or i need a new Blu-ray player.. or i don't know what! 
"life gets in the way of living".. and all that pallava 
