No Other

After the 1973 Byrds reunion, in which Clark's contributions stood out, David Geffen signed him to Asylum. Clark wrote the songs over more than a year at his coastal home in Mendocino. He told Zigzag in 1977 that he was strongly influenced by Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup. He entered the studio in April 1974 with producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye, and they recorded mostly in Los Angeles at The Village Recorder, with the mixing done at Wally Heider Recording in San Francisco.

The players came from the top of the Los Angeles session scene: Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar, Danny Kortchmar and Craig Doerge of The Section, with Jesse Ed Davis, fiddler Richard Greene, Joe Lala, Michael Utley, Butch Trucks, Ben Keith, Chris Hillman, and backing singers including Clydie King, Claudia Lennear, Venetta Fields and Timothy B. Schmit. Kaye said that 13 or 14 songs were demoed with acoustic guitar but only nine were recorded with a full band, and that Train Leaves Here This Morning was left off. The cost passed $100,000. Kaye recalled Geffen asking why there were only eight songs after all that money, and answered that they were eight great songs.

Asylum issued it in September 1974 with no active promotion beyond two promotional singles, and deleted it by 1976. The cover was a collage inspired by 1920s Hollywood glamour, and the back showed Clark in drag at the former John Barrymore estate. Billboard called it a magnificent effort at the time. Its standing grew later: David Bennun in the Guardian called it one of the greatest albums ever made, Rolling Stone's David Browne compared its place in its decade to that of Norman Fucking Rockwell in its own, and Pitchfork's Andy Beta wrote that it was misunderstood for decades. The 2019 4AD reissue, remastered at Abbey Road with a new 5.1 mix, scored 94 out of 100 on Metacritic from 12 reviews.