> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.generationcountry.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # ALBUM RECONSIDERATION: Exile’s Don’t Leave Me This Way - URL: https://www.generationcountry.net/album-reconsideration-exile-dont-leave-me-this-way/ - Published: 2026-10-23T16:36:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T16:36:08.000Z - Description: Before Exile’s country breakthrough, this 1980 pop album sent songs to Alabama, Henry Paul, Sheena Easton and Michael Johnson. Its Nashville connections began in the writing credits. - Author: Jared Ingersol - Tags: Album Reviews, Exile **Warner Bros./Curb (BSK 3437) · 1980** **Produced by Peter Coleman** The usual history of Exile’s *Don’t Leave Me This Way* can be told with two song titles. The Kentucky band recorded “Take Me Down” and “The Closer You Get” in 1980\. Alabama carried both to No. 1 on the country chart a few years later. Exile followed its songs to Nashville, rebuilt itself as a country band and began a remarkable run of No. 1 singles of its own. It is a good story. It is also incomplete. At least four songs from the album soon found second lives with other artists. Its first single reached the Adult Contemporary chart. A second single became a substantial hit in South Africa. Before the LP even appeared, a major Nashville publisher was advertising two of its songs in *Billboard*. Years later, Curb reissued the same ten-song program under a title that reads like hindsight delivered as a punch line: *Keeping It Country*. The later name is easy to overread. J.P. Pennington said the two songs Alabama turned into country standards had been written as pop songs. What survived from *Don’t Leave Me This Way* was something harder to box in: polished pop-band writing that could live in country, adult contemporary and rock without surrendering its identity. Four years later, Marlon Hargis supplied a more exact diagnosis of this period. He told *Cash Box* that Exile's material had been moving in a country direction while the band was still being produced for the European pop market. The songs were moving toward one audience while their production still addressed another. ## A band redistributing the spotlight The album arrived as Exile was reorganizing after Jimmy Stokley's departure. Mike Chapman, who had produced “Kiss You All Over” and the band’s first two Warner/Curb albums, was occupied with Blondie and the Knack. Engineer Peter Coleman moved into the producer’s chair, and the band began sharing the lead vocals more widely. According to Randy Westbrook’s band history, Les Taylor and Mark Gray joined Pennington in alternating lead-vocal duties. A compiled sessionography places the recording on March 30 and 31, 1980, at MCA Whitney in Glendale, California, and lists Pennington and Taylor on guitars, Sonny LeMaire on bass, Steve Goetzman on drums, Marlon Hargis, Gray and Buzz Cornelison on keyboards, and Dwight D. Dunlap on percussion. The lineup explains the real change: Exile’s vocal identity was becoming collective. That would become one of the band’s great advantages. Exile could change radio formats because its center was never only an arrangement or a fashionable studio finish. It was the contrast among individual voices and the strength of the blend when those voices came together. Westbrook records an especially telling retrospective judgment: LeMaire later regarded *Don’t Leave Me This Way* as Exile’s best Warner-era album and remembered Coleman as a producer who welcomed the band’s ideas. ## A single looking for the right address The album opens with “You’re Good for Me,” written by Gray and Greg Guidry. Warner/Curb selected it as the first single, and *Billboard* included it among its recommended releases on May 24, 1980\. It reached No. 44 on the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart and No. 105 on Bubbling Under. Those chart appearances show how the record was being heard and sold: as melodic adult pop, before Exile's country-radio breakthrough. “Nobody’s Hero” and Pennington’s title song come next, followed by “Take Me Down.” Its placement matters. Exile did not set the song apart as a country experiment. It belonged to the same album as the material around it, one entry in a program assembled by a band whose pop vocabulary was broadening. Warner/Curb issued “Take Me Down” as a single, and *Billboard* reviewed a 3:10 radio edit, more than a minute shorter than the LP performance. In the United States it stopped just below the Hot 100\. In South Africa, where Exile had retained an audience, the reconstructed Springbok chart shows a seven-week run and a No. 11 peak in July 1980. “Take Me Down” had a life as an Exile single before Alabama recorded it, including an audience in South Africa. Alabama’s recording reached No. 1 country in July 1982 and crossed into the pop Top 20\. Exile had already recorded and released the song two years earlier. ## Nashville was in the writing rooms Side one closes with “Smooth Sailin’ (Rock in the Road),” written by Gray with Nashville songwriters Johnny Slate and Steve Pippin. Before the album reached stores, a full-page House of Gold advertisement in the April 26, 1980, issue of *Billboard* promoted that song alongside “It Takes Love to Make Love,” another album cut. The ad’s writer roster included Pippin, Slate, Sam Lorber and Jeff Silbar. An established Nashville publisher was showcasing Exile material before Exile officially entered the country market. The later change of format did not begin when someone added acoustic guitar or booked the band into a country club. It began in the movement of writers, publishers and songs between musical communities that were never as separate as radio labels made them seem. The credits tell the same story. Pennington wrote or co-wrote five of the ten songs. Gray had a hand in six. LeMaire shared credit on “It Takes Love to Make Love,” anticipating the songwriting role he would occupy in Exile’s country years. The album joins songs written entirely inside the band to collaborations with Guidry, Slate, Pippin, Silbar, Lorber, Eddie Setser and Lynda Lee Lawley. This was already a self-contained group with an open door to a larger songwriting town. ## More than two songs left home “The Closer You Get,” written by Pennington and Gray, is the album’s best-known traveler after “Take Me Down.” Don King carried it into the country Top 30 in 1981; a contemporary *Record World* review noted an arrangement built around rhythm guitar and steel. Rita Coolidge recorded the song the same year. Alabama’s version reached No. 1 country in July 1983, becoming the group’s tenth chart-topper. Pennington tells Generation Country that Exile “rehearsed the dickens out of it, just like we did every other new song.” He sang lead and joined the backing vocals. Alabama's later recording preserved enough of that vocal approach for him to recognize his own band inside it. His favorite remains Exile's original. But the outward journey did not end with Alabama. Pennington’s title track turned up on Henry Paul’s self-titled 1982 Atlantic album. Reviewing Paul’s record, *Billboard* called his version a midtempo ballad, a change of pace from the album’s guitar attack, and compared its scale to Todd Rundgren’s work with Meat Loaf. Sheena Easton then recorded “Don’t Leave Me This Way” for her 1983 album *Best Kept Secret*. In three years, one Exile song had moved from a Kentucky pop-rock band to a Southern rocker and then to an international pop singer. Pennington’s “There’s a Love” traveled as well. Michael Johnson opened his 1983 album *Lifetime Guarantee* with it. That placed another song from *Don’t Leave Me This Way* in the hands of a singer whose country and adult-contemporary instincts met in the middle. Together, those recordings sharpen the album’s significance. Its afterlife stretches well beyond two future Alabama hits. Four songs, “Take Me Down,” “The Closer You Get,” “Don’t Leave Me This Way” and “There’s a Love,” proved portable enough to attract outside interpreters across country, pop, rock and adult contemporary. The record’s reputation was built sideways, one song and one new voice at a time. Alanna Nash captured the emotional cost of that process in a 1984 *Stereo Review* profile. Pennington called the outside successes “kinda bittersweet”: the royalties were welcome, but they arrived while he was still working to rebuild Exile. His more revealing observation was that “Take Me Down” and “The Closer You Get” were “originally written as pop songs.” Pennington’s distinction saves the album from a tidy piece of revisionism. Exile had not secretly made a pair of country records. Its pop writing could cross the border naturally once country radio supplied the right address. ## The album the catalog renamed The original *Don’t Leave Me This Way* appeared as Warner Bros./Curb BSK 3437\. Curb/MCA restored the same ten-song program under its original title in 1986\. In 1990, after Exile had accumulated its string of country No. 1s, Curb issued it again as *Keeping It Country*. The retitle followed the country breakthrough; the original 1980 album was a pop release. Its songs had since found interpreters across several formats, giving listeners another way into the record. *Don’t Leave Me This Way* deserves more than footnote status because it catches a career changing direction before anyone announces the turn. One single finds an audience halfway around the world. Four songs leave the album and keep working. Nashville appears first in the publishing credits, then in the cover versions, then finally as Exile’s home format. By the time the band went country, its songs had already scouted the road. --- ### About this reconsideration Generation Country’s archival reconsiderations recover overlooked records through original trade coverage, chart documentation, contemporary credits and the later lives of their songs. The complete album circulates commercially under its later title, [*Keeping It Country*](https://music.amazon.com/tracks/B004ICNAIK?ref=generationcountry.net).