[9] Six of these 52 recordings made the top 10, including 1957's "Chances Are" and the 1978 Deniece Williams duet, "Too Much, Too Little, Too Late", which each spent a week at number one,[9] and 32 of them are also on the list of 50 entries that Mathis had on the magazine's Easy Listening chart,[10] which was started in 1961.

[15] 16 of his LPs met the 60,000 album sales mark in the UK to be certified Silver, with eight of those going on to sell 100,000 copies for Gold certification and one of those eight (The Johnny Mathis Collection, 1976) making it to the 300,000 total necessary for the Platinum award.

[16] For the liner notes on the back cover of the album he wrote, "Johnny's singing is thoroughly jazz-oriented, so naturally arrangers were chosen who had a thorough command of the jazz idiom, as well as the ability to write imaginatively for a pop vocalist.

"[19] Since the new surroundings came with the option to produce his own albums, he took advantage of the opportunity to expand his duties, starting with his first release of 1964, Tender Is the Night, and continuing on through several LPs.

[1] In the fall of 1964 he recorded what he thought would be his next release, a collection of songs that came to be known as Broadway because of their inclusion in musicals,[1] but it was shelved by Mercury and not available until 2012, when most of the masters he owned from this period were issued on compact disc for the first time.

[21] In his review for AllMusic, Al Campbell writes, "At the time, Mercury felt the album was too upbeat and not the type of romantic material Mathis had been so successful with during his previous tenure with Columbia.

In the liner notes for the compact disc release of those two albums, So Nice and Johnny Mathis Sings, he is quoted as saying, "'The only time I was not secure in what I was doing was during the three years I was with Mercury.

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were the production team behind their own band Chic's number ones "Le Freak" and "Good Times as well as the Sister Sledge hits "He's the Greatest Dancer" and "We Are Family".

"[27] When asked in a 2011 radio interview as to why the album had never been released, Mathis gave a brief chuckle as he replied, "Probably because the record company is almighty when you're making music to sell.

[1] In 1983 Linda Ronstadt took a break from recording contemporary music in order to make an album of standards with conductor Nelson Riddle, and their collaboration, What's New went triple Platinum.

[29] Barbra Streisand's 1985 release The Broadway Album reached number one and went on to quadruple Platinum certification, so a renewed interest in what came to be known as traditional pop was evident.

[30] Mathis had not tried a studio album without current hits or new songs since the ill-fated Broadway project in 1965, so his choice to collaborate with Henry Mancini in 1986 for The Hollywood Musicals, which had a lineup of classics that were mostly from the 1940s, was quite a change of pace.

With close to 80 minutes of space available on each disc, it was possible to combine two albums on one CD, and several Mathis albums have been paired up and reissued in this format, as shown in the collapsed table below: Duet partners:* Deniece Williams** Jane Olivor*** Stephanie Lawrence**** Paulette# Gladys Knight## Dionne Warwick### Regina Belle Since many radio stations in the US adopt a format change to Christmas music each December, many holiday hits have an annual spike in popularity during the last few weeks of the year and are retired once the season is over.