For Jennifer Warnes, it's the right time

BOSTON — For some long dark hours it looked as if the album Jennifer Warnes might die before it was released. Warnes and producer Jim Price had been working nearly two years on the singer's unheralded comeback attempt (there had been one album on London in 1965 and two Warner Bros. LPs in the late Sixties). During that time, Warnes had had a lot on her mind. Her lover had been murdered while driving a cab in L.A., and she had assuaged a resulting "withdrawn pain in the center of my belly" by returning to Christianity. She was also continually obsessed with her career. Price successfully pushed her to put all those contradictory feelings into her singing, but there wasn't a single on the finished tape; and Clive Davis, Arista's president, refused to put the album out without one.