Even in the Quietest Moments... is the fifth album by the British rock band Supertramp, released on 8 April 1977. It was recorded mainly at Caribou Ranch in Colorado with overdubs, vocals, and mixing completed at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. This was Supertramp's first album to use engineer Peter Henderson, who would work with the band for their next three albums as well.
Even in the Quietest Moments… reached number 16 on the Billboard Pop Albums Chart in 1977 and within a few months of release became Supertramp's first Gold (500,000 copies or more)–selling album in the US. In addition, "Give a Little Bit" became a US Top 20 single and reached number 29 on the UK Singles Chart. While "Give a Little Bit" was the big hit, both "Fool's Overture" and the title track also received a fair amount of FM album-rock play.
In 1978, Even in the Quietest Moments… was ranked 63rd in The World Critic Lists, which was a list of 200 albums compiled by Paul Gambaccini from votes by 47 rock critics and DJs.
Background and recording
<blockquote>I think it was Roger who wanted to get out of Los Angeles to do a record. At the time, the sky was the limit, so we decided to record at the Caribou Ranch, on a mountaintop outside of Denver. What we didn't realize was that the thin air in the mountains makes your voice go weird. It also made it hard for John [Helliwell] to play the sax. So we ended up finishing it back in L.A. at the Record Plant. – Rick Davies, Retrospectacle – The Supertramp Anthology CD booklet (2005)</blockquote>
Though all the songs are credited as being written jointly by Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, Davies wrote "Lover Boy", "Downstream", and "From Now On" by himself, and Hodgson in turn wrote "Give a Little Bit", "Even in the Quietest Moments", "Babaji", and "Fool's Overture" unaided.
Davies said of "Lover Boy" that "I was inspired by advertisements in men's magazines telling you how to pick up women. You know, you send away for it and it's guaranteed not to fail. If you haven't slept with at least five women in two weeks, you can get your money back." Bob Siebenberg recounted that "Rick had been working on 'Lover Boy' for quite a while and finally came up with the long middle section. I just heard that as a really slow, really solid sort of beat, just to give the song dynamics underneath it all, because the song itself is really powerful and it needed something really solid underneath it." Davies commented on the music: "It starts off in a very standard melody thing and then it notches onto a sort of one chord progression or perhaps we should call it a digression. It's a thing where there's hundreds of sounds coming in and going out, a whole collage thing."
"Downstream" is performed solely by Davies on vocal and piano, which were recorded together in one take. Siebenberg has described the song as his favourite on the album "because it's so personal and so pure". the song is a collage of progressive instrumentation and sound samples. Hodgson stated that the song's lyrics are essentially meaningless, explaining: "I like being vague and yet saying enough to set people's imaginations running riot." First are excerpts of Winston Churchill's famous 4 June 1940 House of Commons speech regarding Britain's involvement in the Second World War ("Never Surrender"), followed by sounds of crowds, police cars and bells from London's famous Westminster chime Big Ben clock tower. The flageolet-sounding instrument plays an excerpt from Gustav Holst's "Venus", from his orchestral suite The Planets. Hodgson rated it as one of the 10 best songs he has written. The sheet music on the piano, though titled "Fool's Overture", is actually "The Star-Spangled Banner".
A remastered CD version of the album with full original artwork, lyrics, and credits restored (including the inner sleeve picture of the band absent from the original CD) was released on 11 June 2002 on A&M Records in the US.
Critical reception
In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau remarked that, unlike most progressive rock, which is "pretentious background schlock that's all too hard to ignore", the album is "modest background schlock that sounds good when it slips into the ear."
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Year-end charts
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