My Year In Music: Single Song Playlists, #1 (Everything Happens To Me)

Purposely not titled "The" Year In Music, since the only genre in which I listen to current releases is jazz, and even there I'm hardly focused only on the present. It's been a long time since I was in a situation where we all would be listening to the same new stuff, I guess going back to the Clash and everything that was happening then. I stayed a little bit current through the early days of Pavement, but even that is a very long time ago. I do check in with new releases, but rarely do they make a big enough impression to enter my listening rotation, again, jazz excepted.

Since everything is at one's fingertips now, the question is how does that impact your listening. One of my favorite things is to create playlists of single songs. To get chosen, a song has to have both a melody and lyrics that are bulletproof. Or if just an instrumental, a melody that invites creative variations. Here's the first installment of posts devoted to this pursuit.

1. "Everything Happens To Me." This is a standard, written in 1940, with music by Matt Dennis and lyrics by Tom Adair. True "Great American Songbook" stuff. The melody is so strong that it is just as often performed as an instrumental as it is vocally, even though the lyrics are perfect. I mean, Thelonious Monk recorded it twice as a live solo piano rendition. His use of rubato and dissonance makes the melody even more memorable than it already is. Seek those out. The lyrics are the quintessence of mid-century wiseguy irony, combined with some genuine pathos in the bridge and in last couplet. One reason I like to listen to this over and over is because it's like listening to a puzzle or a problem get solved over and over. How did the composers make the words and music fit together so well? How do different artists approach the puzzle? From a jazz perspective, Chet Baker has pretty much owned this song. But I came to it at this point in time because I was Googling the New York cabaret/jazz singer Nellie McKay, and her version of this came right up. The way she delivers it has the right amount of playfulness and feeling. She made me go, Damn that's a good song. This calls for a playlist! Curiously, the Sinatra versions aren't that great; a tad too smooth. But that was the way Sinatra sang when he and Tommy Dorsey had the first hit with it in 1940. Historical note: Matt Dennis also wrote the melody for "Angel Eyes," another song with a sophisticated melody that's a core part of the canon.