Dinner Music 137: The weekly lineup
rhythm & blues, soul, romantic summer
This week is a bit romantic. What is it about romance that sounds like aching? The finiteness of any given moment? That’s what I’m trying to capture here. The music comes from R&B (old school), soul, and a bit of funk and motown. Romance always feels a bit sweeter in the sun, am I wrong? Let’s begin.
First, we have laconic dream-pop album Jassbusters from “R&B surrealist” (his, or his label’s, words) Connan Mockasin. This sparsely populated album throws fuzz-guitar over sultry drum taps and overlays some searching vocals, in and out of falsetto, giving the tracks a searching coherence. Reminds me a bit of Okay Kaya, similar vibe, that sonic dream-world of vocals and guitar, all the feeling floating in between. Next, we pick up the energy with Bobby Boyd’s self-titled album (produced by George Benson (DM 108), a classic modern soul album, full of good feeling and that classic blues-adjacent melancholy, with songs titles like: “why are you cryin’” and “let bygones be bygones.” The record was originally released on Tiger Lily Records, allegedly a “tax scam” label with a fascinating (and extremely predatory) history. Basically, it meant that the record got no publicity and fell into relative obscurity, but has since been re-issued twice (first on CD, second digitally by Athens of the North). A great one for a lively dinner party. We move into a score Nicolas Godin (of Air) did for a French television show, Au service de la France. Godin calls the album “exercice de style, savoir faire, nothing original” — it was intended as “an homage to classic composers of the ’60s such as Lalo Schifrin.”1 As an American, it’s my euro-desiring right to swiftly fall in love with anything that sounds like Paris in the 1960s. This is a fun album, with a lot of sexiness and nostalgia, great for wine on a summer night. What to say about Our Day Will Come? Did you know it was composed by Mort Garson? Yes, Plantasia Mort Garson (DM 76)! He composed it and handed it off to Ruby and the Romantics, who rocketed it to #1 on the Billboard charts in 1962. Ruby and the Romantics came out of Akron, Ohio, and, as the name might suggest, crafted song after song of romantic ballad, silky smooth, that reached into an abyssal depth of the heart. They were highly influential to The Carpenters, who, as you may know, are at the very center of my musical soul. In 1983, a man named Lewis recorded an album named L’Amour and…that’s about all we know.2 Regardless, the album “begs to be listened to on headphones, and doing so brings you in close.”3
Enjoy.
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