If there's an unfortunate aspect to Steve Gillette's career, it's that he was born just a little too late to become a star on the folk circuit during the boom days of the early-'60s folk revival. With his unabashedly romantic voice and the right ballad, he might've easily soared into the Top Ten in an era in which songs like "Michael" and "Green Green" were scaling the pop charts; he might even have beaten his younger southern California contemporary Jackson Browne to the punch, as a star singer as well as a songwriter, while the latter was passing in and out of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and falling in and out of love with Nico. But, then again, if he had done that, chances are that some record label would've insisted on tarting up Gillette's music with too big accompaniments and turning him into a folk-pop star, and at the end of the day, between expenses and overhead and the lousy contracts that were out there in the 1960s, he'd have had little to show for the compromises he'd have made.