AMG Review of Wild Heart of the Young

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

After two modest-selling albums, Karla Bonoff tried a new approach with her third, posing for a cover photo in a lace dress with a male model, cutting a specially chosen cover song for a hit single, and making an MTV video. And it worked, sort of. Paul Kelly's "Personally," a coy and catchy pop song utterly uncharacteristic of Bonoff's other work, did make it into the Top 40. But that didn't stimulate the album's sales enough to keep Columbia Records from dropping Bonoff. Beyond the commercial considerations, though, Bonoff's original songs, which made up the bulk of the album, simply were not up to the standard set by her debut, and Wild Heart Of The Young was the weakest of her three Columbia Records albums.