Once Upon A Time In California = Belinda Carlisle (August 2025)

Catchy title.

I like the piano vibe on "Time In A Bottle "

She redid this song & "Superstar" by The Carpenters on the album but I thought they

were just the original recordings & have been skipping over them each time they came up.

The songs are bit to short. Wish she made a pop album of new songs but it's a nice listen.

Yeah, I agree with the short songs comment R4 but then I think that most 60s songs were under 4 minutes in length so that's probably why the album is under 40 minutes long. It could've used a couple more tunes by todays audience's expectations.

I've heard all of the originals on the album except for this one -

"Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "Superstar" are standouts, but they don't really add anything to the originals.

I don’t know if it’s age or production, but I no longer like the way her voice has sounds in recent recordings. Maybe her 80s stuff had more echo, backing vocals, or double tracked or something, but those songs just sounded ‘robust.’ I don’t know.

R8 - I know what you mean.

I read in her bio that the producers of Beauty and the Beat (first album) sped up her singing, which actually thinned her voice out a bit. Her solo stuff seemed a bit richer in texture.

The way the vocals are done on the song "Vacation" (her + whatever they did to her voice in the studio) are my all-time favorite, especially the opening lyrics.

R8 R9 Belinda talks about her voice at the 20:00 mark (also the Go-Go's film, Brian Wilson & her childhood) while promoting this new album -

Thanks, R10!

I think the best release with Belinda's vocal in 2025 is this remix for "One" as I can't stop playing it.

Her voice does sound very different…. a full bouncy vibrato instead of that faster chipmunk-vibrato she had in the 80s. But then few singers sound exactly the same 40 years later.

Her version of "The Air That I Breathe".

It is bad karaoke.

I like Belinda well enough but it all does have karaoke vibes. And song after song her vibrato becomes too much, cloying, like marzipan. For fans only.

This is the album's most upbeat track & the most viewed =