Saturday, June 16, 2007 Kitty Kallen, "Little Things Mean a Lot" (June 5, 1954) Pop is "supposed to be" about immediacy, so it's pleasing to hear an argument for subtlety over extravagance for a change: "I never cared much for diamonds and pearls/'cause honestly, honey, they just cost money." Kitty instead prefers small-scale tokens of love and affection, applied constantly, because they reassure her he'll always be there to...reassure her. Kitty leaves no clues as to what level of relationship she enjoys with her significant other, but even without the "now and forever, that's always and ever" line towards the end, it's a sentiment that seems specific to a married woman's point of view. Curiously, Kitty makes no mention of behaviors her significant other might expect from her -- the song places all the burdens of relationship-maintenance on the guy. So does this mean Kitty is free to be extravagant, even if she admonishes her lover not to be? It sure seems that way. While she starts off the record restrained, almost intimate, by the end of the third verse she explodes into weepy-torch mode (which coming from Kitty's kittenish voice sounds annoyingly petulant). So like "I Went to Your Wedding" or "The Doggie in the Window," it's very much a "woman's record," very much about what some songwriters assumed were the hopes and anxieties that preoccupied about 50% of the record-buying audience, and like "Doggie" and "You Belong to Me," a covert fantasy where women enjoy freedoms their male lovers don't. 4 (link)

Wednesday, June 13, 2007 Perry Como, "Wanted" (April 10, 1954) This lacks the overstatement of "If" and the bombast of "Don't Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes," but other than a harmless lyric that speaks of infidelity in terms of crime, I'm not sure what this song has. Maybe Perry Como is just too damned subtle for me. I sometimes detect bits of obvious vocal mastery (for example: the ever-so-slight gap between the first two syllables of "repented," a unexpected dose of drama), but he's pretty close to being unreadable here, adopting more-or-less the same easy-going tone as his other hits, if maybe a little slower and partly occluded by some background singers. This committment to easy in all contexts starts sounding winds up sounding like non-involvement, even defiant non-involvement: he won't let anybody in, he is a cipher and likes it that way, he passeth all understanding. I get exasperated thinking about him: I can't tell if there's anything to think about. 4 (link)

Monday, June 11, 2007 Jo Stafford, "Make Love To Me!" (March 13 and 27, 1954) "Buh-bom-bom-bom-boom." And with the froggy baritone that kicks off this song, back to earth we go. Oh well. As the exclamation point might make you suspect, Jo Stafford is very no-nonsense about sex. All too no-nonsense. She sings her lines rather mechanically to the bouncing-ball rhythm, leaving the impression that what she's less interested in actually doing the nasty than getting it over with it. Very slight. 3 (link)

Sunday, June 10, 2007 Doris Day, "Secret Love" (February 27 and March 20, 1954) "Secret Love" sticks out like a silver thumb in our countdown. It's a song from a movie (Calamity Jane), and it shows. At 3:42, it's the longest song so far (not counting the double-sided "It's in the Book"), and yet it is so perfectly constructed that there is no moment wasted, and yet again there is no moment that's fussy. It luxuriates. It has time for Doris to think and feel. You can hear her silently ponder her state in the orchestral break, then when she's collected her reserves, shouts out her secret with tomboy joy to Disneyfied vistas of anthropomorphized stars, hills, golden daffodils. Unlike its classless neighbors on the charts, it has nothing that qualifies as a hook, unless the song's hooklessness is its hook. It has little relationship with the confines of pop radio. No, it wasn't written with radio but with Cinerama and Technicolor in mind. 10 (link)