L. Franklin. After her father died in 1984, the singer began thinking about returning to the music scene. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Franklin said that following Get It Right, she wanted to do "a record with a younger sound to it. I'd been listening to the radio and I really liked what I heard. I figured to myself that it was time for me to do something serious." Arista Records arranged a telephone conversation with producer and singer Narada Michael Walden to discuss working together on Franklin's next studio album. Since Franklin disliked traveling, Walden subsequently started assembling backing tracks in Los Angeles and brought the session tapes to Detroit, where Franklin added her vocals. According to Walden, Franklin "had to get reacquainted with being in the studio" following her hiatus but "it didn't take long for the singer to regain her form". Despite Franklin's reputation as a singer, Walden found her easy to work with, citing her a "black Mae West". Further elaborating on the recording process, he stated: "She'll sing a song down in the lower range maybe four or five times. Then she'll sing it up in her range and do two or three takes." Looking for a male singer to work with Franklin on the duet song "Push", Walden "put out signals, but a lot of people were frightened to death to sing" with Franklin. Former The J. Geils Band vocalist Peter Wolf, however, jumped at the chance. Critical reception Who's Zoomin' Who? received generally favorable reviews from music critics. AllMusic editor Craig Lytle called the album a return "in style" and praised the album for its singles as well as Franklin's vocal performance which he declared as "lively", "laudable" and "soulful". Lytle rated the album three and a half out of five stars. in his review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau found that Franklin "hasn't done anything near this good in over a dozen [years]. It couldn't have happened without the top-forty revival, and it couldn't have happened without Narada Michael Walden, who unhesitatingly plugged his first legend into one pop format after another and came up with classics almost every time." Giving the album an A rating, he concluded that "from lead rocker to hooked ballad to Caribe Richie carnivalesque, these songs go no deeper than Franklin can make them by breathing, but their instant inevitability could keep this album alive