Emotion

by William Ruhlmann Barbra Streisand's first album of contemporary material in four years was a typical '80s adult contemporary superstar release, each track written and produced as a potential "power ballad" single by an extensive team of other performers, in this case including Richard Perry, Kim Carnes, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire, Jim Steinman, Albhy Galuten (the Bee Gees' producer), Richard Baskin, Diane Warren, John Mellencamp, and Streisand herself. Streisand proved capable of handling everything from White's space-age R&B to Steinman's melodramatic overproduction. (He was the man who brought you Meat Loaf.) But as usually happens with such big budget efforts, the album lacked consistency, and as Columbia tried to pull several singles off it without notable success, it sold only to Streisand's million-member base audience.