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.
My final album of 1970 (which on the whole was an excellent year for music, I’ve discovered) is Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Sings Newman. This record is a collaboration between Nilsson and one of my favorite songwriters and performers of all time, Randy Newman.
Newman didn’t just write the ten tracks on this album but played piano on them as well. And while I can’t imagine anybody topping Newman’s readings of his own songs, Nilsson’s sweet vocals are a nice match for the masterfully simple tunes on this album. I think I need to buy this thing pronto.
Now here’s a song that I’d never heard before discovering it through this cover version. ‘Don’t Forget Me’ was originally written and recorded by Harry Nilsson for his 1974 album Pussy Cats.
That album was produced by John Lennon and features a wild cover of Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ as well as gentler fare like this. Apparently Nilsson and Lennon’s hard partying carried over into the studio and resulted in a wild, half-genius, half-WTF album.
Nilsson even ruptured a vocal cord during the sessions but kept it to himself, and you can hear his voice getting progressively more harsh through the record.
Meet Me In Montauk 