Saturday, April 23, 2005

Al Martino, "Here in My Heart"
(June 21, 1952)

Aha! Finally, I've caught Tom Ewing's coattails! Except that's a little misleading, as "Here In My Heart" went #1 in the U.S. half a year earlier than it did in the U.K. I'll have to review about five more songs before I reach the stuff that topped the charts mid-November 1952. Like that'll ever happen.

Here Martino's a pop-opera singer in the overpowering Mario Lanza mode. (Lanza in fact was going to record "Here in My Heart" but Martino, a childhood friend, begged him not to.) Perhaps this is par for the course in Italian-American pop, which I only know through its very incidental broadcast in my Italian-American family, but I find mild irony in the way Martino displays his vocal prowess by getting simpy, or, more accurately, by showing how he can go from Verdian macho to abject croon in mere seconds, line after line. His virtuosity overpowers all textual meaning, reducing it to perfume -- it took me many listens before I caught the slight redundancy of "I'm alone and so lonely" in the first line -- which is fine, the lyrics are so generic they could suit all sorts of vocal approaches without turning into parody. Nah, the voice bears the brunt of meaning, it's the loudest thing here, both semiotically and volume-wise. He feels! God, does he ever feel! The manly way to describe loss is by framing it as total and annihilating, empowering a singer to reach the furthest emotional extremes...the ones acceptable in a pop record circa 1952, anyway. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" will cover very similar territory nearly twenty years later, but with more will-to-wimp. I like wimp better because I am a wimp, hence 4.

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