Sony
2000
Better Part Of Me
About This Album
The vogue for English-sung Latin pop that swept the U.S. in 1999 may bode well for a comeback by Jon Secada who contributed to it by writing songs for the hit albums by Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez. But, of course, things don't always work out that way; often, it's only the newly emerged artists who benefit from such a trend. Secada broke big in 1992 with his self-titled debut album and made a successful follow-up with 1994's Heart, Soul & a Voice, but then he suffered a relative failure with 1997's Secada, at least in part because his record label, the since-shuttered SBK division of EMI, was already falling apart and failed to support it. He jumped to Epic, the label home of Gloria Estefan who gave him his start in the business, and clearly has spent a lot of time and money constructing his fourth English-language album, Better Part of Me. It's one of those massive efforts, employing nine producers in an attempt to construct ten possible singles. (There are also four Spanish-language versions and remixes at the end of the disc.) Although Secada has in the past succeeded with ballads that scaled the adult contemporary charts even when they only performed modestly on pop radio, half of Better Part of Me consists of dance songs, several of them, notably the first single and lead-off track "Stop" and "Papi," in a percussive Latin style that strongly recalls Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony's English-language hits of 1999.
Track List (try tracks 1,4,5 and 9)

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