“The nine players strong big band with the name that couldn’t possibly be more programmatic,” (Delrohsen) … “Even though their music has never been stuck in 60s/70s nostalgia and incorporates younger ideas like Hip Hop grooves or modern styles of guitar shredding, the overall vibe – no matter if the tune is smooth and soulful or a little more dirty and edgy – is one that makes you expect to see the ghosts of Charles Bradley and James Brown come down to join into the jam while Freddie Hubbard blows his horn at any given moment … ”
The band “continues the journey of broadening (its) sound with new influences and ideas, while maintaining their addictive easy accessibility. This is music for the soul, for good times – and to turn bad times around.”
Starting in D minor, “El Niño” (2019) at times covers its metric tracks a bit when it comes to “finding one,” including the moment the horn section makes its first entrance. But other sections have a groove that’s completely straightforward. At 1:52, an unprepared key change lifts us up to Eb minor in time for a tenor sax feature. After a percussion break clears the air, we return to D minor to close out the tune.
“The Tymes began as the Latineers in 1956,” (Philadelphia Music Alliance). In 1963, they released their hit record “So Much In Love” … “the song hit number one on the Billboard charts. The classic was also the first record to replace the Beatles in the number one slot on the British charts. ‘So Much In Love’ is currently number 38 on Billboard’s all time record list. Their other most requested chart toppers include ‘Wonderful, Wonderful,’ ‘Somewhere’ and ‘You Little Trustmaker.’ … The Tymes, now known as The Original Tymes, were the 2005 inductees of The Vocal Group Hall Of Fame Foundation in Youngstown, Ohio. They were also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award and Retro Artist award in 2017 by The American Music Guild.” The group joined the Philly Music Walk of Fame in 2023.
RCA Records signed the group in late 1973. Soul Express: “Those days, RCA paid serious attention to developing their soul roster and they were awarded with some hits by the Hues Corporation (‘Rock the Boat’), Wilson Pickett (‘Mr. Magic Man’), the New Birth (‘I Can Understand It’), the Main Ingredient (‘Everybody Plays the Fool,’ ‘Just Don’t Want to Be Lonely’) and the Friends of Distinction (‘Grazing In the Grass,’ ‘Going In Circles,’ ‘Love Or Let Me Be Lonely’). In the summer of 1974, RCA released their first Tymes single … ‘You Little Trustmaker.’ Written by Christopher Mack Jackson, the single stayed on the Billboard charts for fourteen weeks and reached #12 (pop), #20 (soul) and #18 (UK pop).”
Starting with its intro featuring a distinctive wordless vocal, “You Little Trustmaker” is initially in F major. 1:53 shifts up to F# major, bringing an instrumental verse featuring a full compliment of strings and brass, augmented with another wordless moment. Stick around for the track’s genre-defying unresolved ending!
“Each member of Toto played a part in bringing ‘Rosanna’ to fruition. Vocalist Bobby Kimball and guitarist Steve Lukather transposed the musical key so the verse and chorus could be traded between them as a duet,” (LouderSound). “(Keyboardists) Steve Porcaro and David Paich ironed out the keyboard solo at five o’clock in the morning. Late drummer Jeff Porcaro laid down a masterful shuffle inspired by John Bonham.
‘Jeff was really into Led Zeppelin,’ Lukather told Classic Rock, ‘and for ‘Rosanna’ he morphed ‘Fool In the Rain’ [from Zep’s 1979 album In Through The Out Door] with a Bernard Purdie drum groove [a renowned session drummer, Purdie invented the Purdie Shuffle]. And we took it from there.’ As former session musicians to a man, it was little surprise that Toto bottled ‘Rosanna’ fast in the studio. ‘In one afternoon we did the basic rhythm track,’ Lukather said. ‘And that first guitar solo was made up on the spot the first time we played it.'”
All the hard work certainly paid off: upon its release in the summer of 1982, the track reached US #2 and UK #12. Starting in G major, the key shifts down to F major for the second half of the verse. But the downward motion in key is muted by a rising melodic range (up a minor seventh) as the lead vocal shifts from Lukather to Kimball at 0:36.
Lou Johnson’s “magical 60s Big Top recordings have long been regarded as a template for classic uptown soul and those who own any Johnson singles know they own real treasure … Raised as a gospel singer, Lou’s greatest vocal quality was honesty,” (Soul + Jazz + Funk). “Within a few bars he could go from raw power to vulnerable tenderness and always sound convincing. He was also an accomplished piano player.
Big Top Records also ensured that their man was only given the very best songs to record. The company’s HQ was in New York’s famed Brill Building – home to the city’s songwriting community. People like Bacharach and David were regularly offering Big Top their new songs. Lou Johnson recorded seven Bacharach songs (‘Message To Martha’, ‘Reach Out For Me’, ‘The Last One To Be Loved’ ,’Always Something There To Remind Me’, ‘Magic Potion,’ and ‘If I Never Get To Love You’). Johnson’s best known UK outing (is) the Northern fave, ‘Unsatisfied’ … The big question, of course, is why such outstanding music didn’t make Johnson a star … “
“Unsatisfied” (1965) opens with a bang, driven by an infectious groove. Supported by a boisterous percussion section, brass, and a confident group of female backup singers, Johnson romps through the syncopated lead vocals. At 1:23, the key shifts up by a half step in advance of an interlude and then the return of the lead vocal.
After the popularity of disco waned, so did album sales for the Bee Gees — widely considered standard bearers for genre. “… And yet Bee Gees songs still hit huge in the US (in the early 1980s); they just did it without the words ‘Bee Gees’ on the record cover,” (Stereogum). “Consider Barbra Streisand’s 1980 LP Guilty. Barry Gibb produced the album with his regular Bee Gees collaborators Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten. Gibb also wrote or co-wrote every song on the LP. He sang, played guitar, and did the horn and string arrangements on Guilty. Guilty was basically a Bee Gees album, except with Barbra Streisand singing lead … On Guilty, the ballads dominate. ‘Woman in Love,’ the biggest hit from Guilty, is an extremely Bee Gees song, and yet nobody would confuse it with disco.
… Multi-tracking his own voice, Barry Gibb does the backing vocals, echoing the song’s central melody and anchoring it so that Streisand can sing all her showiest runs. Gibb and Streisand recorded the song in Miami with an elite squad of session musicians, and it sounds lush and clean and expensive. Strings and horns hum to each other. Electric pianos glow. The heavily processed guitars murmur fancily. On the chorus, the echo on Gibb’s voice is immaculate, and Streisand holds notes for absurd lengths of time. It’s terribly dramatic, in a good way. ‘Woman in Love’ (was) Streisand’s fifth and final #1 hit.”
After a few verses and choruses in Eb minor, 3:03 brings a shift up to E major for a final chorus. Streisand’s famously strong belt takes top billing here, well above melody, lyric, arrangement, etc.!
“It’s humorous to see what experts in the music world thought was the location of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘My Little Town,’ the duo’s final Top 10 Columbia Records single,” (Viera Voice). “On October 18, 1975, Simon hosted the second broadcast of Saturday Night Live. In doing so, he brought on his former partner. They sang three songs together, including a new Simon composition called ‘My Little Town” … the fun began when people began to opine exactly where they thought that little town was.
In his book Paul Simon: A Life, writer Marc Eliot proclaims that ‘My Little Town’ is ‘clearly Queens, and all the references to schoolbooks, saluting the flag and so on appear to be symbols of nostalgia for the days of Tom and Jerry as much as for the years of Simon and Garfunkel.’ Not so, counters music critic Dave Marsh, the author of The Heart of Rock and Soul. ‘(It’s) a portrait of the middle-class Forest Hills, NY neighborhood where Simon and Garfunkel grew up.’
… In a (1980s) interview with Bill Flanagan for his book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Great Songwriters, Simon admitted, ‘I was picturing a town. I was thinking about Gloucester, Massachusetts. A friend of mine comes from Gloucester, and he used to talk about what it was like to grow up there … . That song was entirely an act of imagination. … There’s no element of me in there at all.'”
Starting in E major, the tune then briskly parades through many keys; at the 1:14 mark, D major is a resting point for awhile. After an interlude, the tonality shifts to B minor at 2:05 for the woeful mantra “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.” 2:23 brings another multi-key tour before B minor and the mantra return — this time accompanied by the intensity of a full horn section even as the tune fades.
Dana Valery was ahead of her time. She released her cover of Simon + Garfunkel’s “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies” a half-year before their own version was released as the B-side to “Fakin’ It” in July 1967. There’s even a snippet of Paul Simon speaking on the recording (at 0:39). Her version is a banger!
She was born in Italy, and moved with her family to South Africa at an early age. Her brother was the famous tenor Sergio Franchi. While she recorded mostly in English, her discography includes 1963’s All’Italiana and two EPs of Italian material released in South Africa. Valery was a member of the original South African cast of the musical Wait a Minim; she later reprised her role with the London and Broadway productions of that play.
The sonic palette of this track is so expansive that it’s hard to believe its runtime is only 2:13 long! The groove of Valery’s cover version is stronger, the textures more saturated, and the tempo is faster than the original (which we’re including below). The cover’s key change is at 1:34.
Ray Charles and Willie Nelson’s duet “’Seven Spanish Angels’ showcases the vocal strengths of both artists … allowing the lyric and the singers to shine,” (Country Universe). Written by Troy Seals and Eddie Setser, the tune was released in 1985. “… Charles and Nelson deliver this song with the reverence and empathy that it deserves. It feels like the best music often comes from storytelling like this, where characters with such different lives than us listeners can imagine have their stories told with humanity.”
“It was released in November 1984 as a single from Charles’ 1984 album Friendship,” (The Billboard Book of Country Hits). “Charles and Nelson split the verses, with Charles singing the first and Nelson the second, Charles sang the first and second choruses with Nelson joining for the outro. It was also included on Nelson’s 1985 compilation album Half Nelson. ‘Seven Spanish Angels’ was the most successful of Charles’ eight hits on the country chart. The single spent one week at number one and a total of twelve weeks on the country chart.”
Willie’s clipped delivery provides contrast with Ray’s lyrical phrasing. The two vocalists have a similar range, but the overarching difference in timbre between their two instantly recognizable voices is one of this version’s more noticeable features. At 2:58, the key moves up a half step for the final few verses.
Film and stage actor Tim Curry, a UK native, left us this week at age 80 after a long illness. After 1975’s classic film interpretation of the musical theatre classic Rocky Horror became a hit, “Tim Curry found himself in demand both on Broadway and in Hollywood,” (The Independent). “On the stage, he was nominated for a Tony Award three times over the course of 24 years, for roles as varied as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1981’s Amadeus, swashbuckling movie star Alan Swann in 1992’s My Favorite Year, and King Arthur in 2005’s Spamalot … His film and television roles were just as eclectic.” Curry’s co-star Rob Schneider remembered: “’I have never known another actor who could say more with a knowing grin or a raised eyebrow than the splendid Tim Curry. I was astonished as a young actor to witness Tim do a scene seven completely different ways and ALL OF THEM FANTASTIC!’ remembered Schneider.”
” … Rocky Horror became a cult classic hit and the center of its own devoted subculture,” (W Magazine). “Curry, suddenly famous, found himself inside a celebrity world he would later chronicle in his 2025 memoir Vagabond, with encounters with David Bowie and nights at Studio 54 alongside Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Carly Simon … By the end of his career, Curry had acting credits in roughly 126 movies and feature films, making him the sort of omnipresent figure that feels like part of the very fabric of pop culture … Of his penchant for playing villains, Curry told The Guardian in a 2025 interview, ‘I’ve always tried to make them amusing, which gives them a bit more edge. It’s like people being drawn to the scene of a car crash … ‘”
Curry is of course best known for his role in Rocky Horror, but we are featuring his performance as the con artist Rooster Hannigan in the 1982 movie version of Annie, alongside Bernadette Peters and Carol Burnett. With a score written by Charles Strouse, the film followed the 1977 Broadway hit. “Initially intended as a major production number, the final version (of ‘Easy Street’) is more contained, but still crackles with villainous chemistry,” (Golden Age Flicks). Starting in Bb major, the tune makes a bouncy shift to B major around the 1:25 mark. Several more dizzy jumps in tonality follow; meanwhile, the actors are completely absorbed in delivering relaxed-looking but exquisitely choreographed physical comedy.
“We’ve been wishing for something to unite us, and as always we have forgotten to be careful what we wish for,” (Esquire). “Today each of us has lost a family member. Dolly Parton has died at age 80, and it’s a measure of the space she leaves behind that no words seem to want to fit in front of her name. I’ve tried a few, too: ‘Country music superstar’ is limiting, ‘entertainer’ doesn’t cut it, ‘icon’ has been rendered meaningless by overuse. She did too many things, at too high a level, with too singular a sensibility, that reached too many people in too personal a way to be reduced to a simple descriptor. ‘Dolly’ will have to do.
Even if you aren’t a superfan, you know the details of her life. You know she was (the fourth of 12 children, raised) in rural Tennessee in a one-room log cabin … you know she started playing guitar and writing songs at age eight and those songs got her on local radio at age 13. You know she went right from high school to Nashville, where she met her husband Carl Dean at a laundromat the day she arrived, and that she got her big break as the new ‘girl singer’ on The Porter Wagoner Show, which she soon outgrew. You know that leaving Porter behind was the basis of ‘I Will Always Love You,’ and maybe she did write that song on the very same day she wrote ‘Jolene,’ or maybe she didn’t, but it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s now up with George Washington chopping down the cherry tree in American lore.”
Co-written by Carole Bayer Sager and Bruce Roberts, “You’re the Only One” (1979) topped the US and Canadian Country charts. But it also crossed over for respectable top-100 chart positions in both countries, also reaching #14 (US) and #1 (Canada) on the adult contemporary charts. The intro and verse are in C# major, leading into a chorus which climbs up to D major (0:42). At 1:14, the next verse settles back into the original key. The two keys continue to alternate throughout. We’ve featured many of Dolly’s most famous tunes in the past (including the multi-key hit “Here You Come Again“). But today, we’ve chosen “You’re the Only One” to honor the sheer depth of her catalog, comprising scores of tunes. This track was merely a garden-variety big hit, not quite reaching the level of multi-generational classic. Many thanks to Julianna A. for submitting this track!
