The second side starts as warm acoustic guitar, whispered vocals, swirling strings lead into Love's Riddle. What do you do when your love is untrue ... isn't an original question, but it’s a theme that has been mined consistently through the years. The start of Fandango continues the same feel before an up-tempo middle section lifts things out of the low down feeling that had prevailed for the preceding four and a bit minutes, which is quite long enough for that sort of thing to last. A couple of dramatic chords and we’re back to the whispered vocals. It’s a pleasant exercise in contrasts.
A swirl of strings and finger-picked acoustic guitar leads into Nothing Lasts. As usual with Miller’s lyrics the words aren’t too deep, but the message is stated fairly simply and if they’re a string of sentiments you’ve heard many times before, maybe that’s because they’re describing something that most of us have felt at some time. There’s a tasteful call and response element in there as well. The album closes with Journey From Eden, a ballad that works in some of the same ground Miller was mining as far back as Children of the Future. Again, while the lyrics aren’t going to end up in an anthology of Rock’s deepest poets, if the point of the exercise is to create something that people can identify with without travelling too far into navel-gazing Miller succeeded reasonably well for mine.
Like most of its predecessors Recall The Beginning.... didn’t have too much impact on the charts. I’d been sufficiently enthused by the album to line up for The Joker and Fly Like An Eagle when they came out, and the successes Miller had with the next couple of albums was enough to seal his future direction. Unfortunately, given events in London and New York in the late seventies, that wasn’t a direction I was keen on following.