Our fourth numbered song comes from Givin’ It Up,the 2006 collaboration between jazz artists Al Jarreau and George Benson.
The album featured appearances by Jill Scott and Paul McCartney, among others, and songs by Billie Holiday, John Legend, Daryl Hall and Sam Cooke, in addition to Jarreau’s own compositions. It won two Grammys, one for a Benson instrumental performance and one for the vocal performance by the duo and Jill Scott.
‘Three’ turned out to be a more difficult find than I expected when compiling my list of 31 Numbered Songs.
After quite a bit of searching, I narrowed it down to a 6-minute emo dirge by “post-rock” band Athletics and a 2009 Britney Spears electropop track about the joy of threesomes.
Call me crazy, but I’m going with the dirge.
I have a pretty extensive music collection, but nowhere near extensive enough to provide fodder for 31 songs named after the numbers one through 31.
So one of the great things about this challenge is how it has forced me to discover new music by artists I’d never even heard of.
For almost as long as I’ve been postings Songs of the Day (10 years come July!) I’ve wanted to do a series of songs named after numbers. One month’s worth, from ‘One’ to ‘Thirty One.’ For some reason I never got around to it until now.
Each day of March, I’ll feature a song that shares a title with the date. Wherever possible, I’ll use songs whose titles are just the number with no words. But that’s harder to pull off for some numbers, and sometimes I just like a song enough to give it a pass.
I can’t do a week on Academy Award winning songs without giving a nod to Disney animation. Songs from animated Disney films have won a whopping 13% of all Best Original Song Oscars.
The trend started way back the 40s with Pinocchio‘s ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ (1940) and ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ from 1947’s racially problematic Song of the South. Disney had a 40-year drought after that, until 1989’s The Little Mermaid brought the studio back with a vengeance. Including that one for ‘Under the Sea,’ Disney animated films would go on to win seven of the next 10 Best Original Song Oscars.
Meet Me In Montauk 