Elliot recorded "Make Your Own Kind of Music" after she had a hit in the summer of 1969 with "
It's Getting Better", another Mann/Weil song and the second single from her second solo album,
Bubblegum, Lemonade, and... Something for Mama. That album had been produced by
Dunhill Records vice president of
A&R Steve Barri, who said: "[Since Dunhill] didn't have much success with [the debut Cass Elliot solo album]
Dream a Little Dream we wanted to get her back on the [upper] charts and we tried to find some commercial songs." Barri also attributed the
bubblegum music focus of his output with Elliot to a desire "to capture who she was... this real fun-loving positive... person I couldn't imagine anybody... not loving." In a September 1969
Melody Maker interview a week prior to the US release of the "Make Your Own Kind of Music" single, Elliot stated: "Bubblegum music is very pleasant to listen to... but it's like they say about Chinese food: half an hour after tasting it you are hungry again", although she did concede, "maybe [bubblegum] is what I am supposed to be doing [since] my voice is very light... I just can't sing heavy material". Elliot would be less easygoing in her 1971 summation of her 1968–1970 tenure with Dunhill Records, saying she had been "forced to be so bubblegum that I'd stick to the floor when I walked." Barri, while admitting—also in 1971—that "Cass was one artist I couldn't find the answer for," could be considered social commentary: Steve Barri would rank "Make Your Own Kind of Music" in with "pop songs [that] really kind of say something". Steve Barri considered "Make Your Own Kind of Music" to be a guaranteed Top Ten hit; the single would garner heavy radio airplay but comparatively meager sales, The follow-up single to "Make Your Own Kind of Music": "
New World Coming"—another Mann/ Weil song—was similarly a sugarcoated
message song and would have similar soft chart impact—with a #42 Hot 100 peak—signaling Elliot's challenges in maintaining a profile as a current hitmaker, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. The follow-up to "New World Coming", "A Song That Never Comes", would be Elliot's final single to reach the Hot 100, spending two weeks at #99 in August 1970. Dunhill released Elliott's third solo album in October 1970, ''
Mama's Big Ones, compiling seven of her eight Hot 100 singles plus some previously unreleased tracks, as her final solo album on the label. Subsequent to the one-off collaborative album Dave Mason & Cass Elliot'' on
Blue Thumb, Dunhill announced in July 1970 that Elliot would reunite with her former bandmates for a
final Mamas & Papas album, after which she would depart Dunhill to record for
RCA Victor. ==Personnel==