I recently made playlists for each of my daughters, filled with songs I expected (and hoped) they would like. They have different musical sweet spots, overlapping with my own and a little bit with each other.
My younger daughter, Fiona, shares my love for gentle, melancholy songs. Aimee Mann, Simon & Garfunkel, that sort of thing. So I knew she’d be a perfect audience for my beloved Ron Sexsmith, who has made a career out of those kinds of songs.
‘Strangers in the Night,’ recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1966 for an album of the same name, reached #1 in both the U.S. and the UK. It won three Grammy awards, including Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. The album became the most commercially successful in Sinatra’s career.
And yet Ol’ Blue Eyes hated the song. When he was first given the sheet music, he reportedly told his aid “I don’t want to sing this, it’s a piece of shit.”
Here’s a track from The Third Eye Center, a collection of previously unreleased tracks Belle and Sebastian put out in 2013.
This is a mostly forgettable collection. There’s a reason these songs weren’t put on official album released in the first place. But it’s worth a listen for completists.
‘Night Game’ is an odd and borderline silly song from the otherwise great 1975 Paul Simon album Still Crazy After All These Years.
This track recounts a baseball game during which the pitcher drops dead at a pivotal moment. I guess it’s about the triviality of things like sports in the face of mortality, probably as a metaphor for a lot of other things. But the seriousness of the delivery and the dirgelike music just make it kind of funny.
‘Return to Sender’ is an Elvis Presley track from the 2002 compilation 30 No. 1 Hits. At least that’s where it lives in my music collection. It was originally released as a single in 1962 and performed in the film Girls! Girls! Girls!, a clip from which is embedded below.
The song made it to only #2 on the U.S. charts but spent three weeks at #1 in the U.K. Indeed, 11 of the #1 hits on the compilation reached that pinnacle only in the U.K.
Meet Me In Montauk 