Remember a Day

Tag: writing

  • Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Studio Album | Released May 27, 1963

    Recorded July 9, 1962 – April 24, 1963 at Columbia Studio A, New York City | Label: Columbia | Producers: John Hammond & Tom Wilson

    My copy: 2025 Mono Reissue | Purchased in March 2026 | Discogs

    “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel. But my novels don’t have the usual story-lines. They’re about my feelings at a certain place at a certain time.”

    Bob Dylan. Lots of words written about the man. Should I add to this litany of myth and speculation? He currently lives inside of an ironic public persona, a continuation of what he’s always done. His internal argument, I suspect is that we as a society just don’t know what’s going on. He’s doing AI things now, apparently. I’m not entirely sure. What I find massively appealing is his anti-social, anti-establishment persona, cultivated carefully over decades. I think it’s a product of his uniqueness and his genuine struggle with accepting fame. He writes for himself and for his own myth. The constant “what does your song mean” onslaught must have gotten to him early on, and the rest is a long, deliberate, magnificent evasion.

    It started with Freewheelin’, his second album and the first record made up almost entirely of original tracks. This album is still a monument. The obelisk in the folk swamp. It reached a lot of people. The songs inspired people, gave them hope in a genuinely strange and frightening time. 1963. Things were getting real weird in America. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy shot. The Civil Rights Movement in full boil. Nuclear destruction a real and present possibility, and a fervent anti-communist government dragging the country toward a ground war in Vietnam.

    In 1962 Bob released his first album, simply titled Bob Dylan. It was a piecemealed collection of mostly folk standards previously recorded by other artists, with only two original songs: “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York.” The second record was a massive jump in terms of songwriting ability, recording acumen, and vocal performance. A genuine career maker. You can sense with this album the good feelings Bob had writing and recording his own material. He was only 22 while making it.

    When the first record came out, it was largely a byproduct of the late 1950s and early 1960s New York City folk scene. On a small scale, a group of thrift shop clothes-wearing hipsters sitting around drinking coffee, listening to music of the vagabond. The guitar case and a few dollars in your pocket. Everyone dropping in to the club to see what new acts are trying to break out into show business. A real scene, and a conscious rejection of the corporate nature of rock and roll at the time. Rock radio, music industry moguls trying desperately to manufacture hits and cash in. It was a rejection of political trends as well. Youth moving toward new directions, thinking big ideas, and imagining the changes required to achieve them.

    Bob Dylan fell into this scene, but in his own way and with his own set of inspirations. His efforts to meet Woody Guthrie, the folk icon, were what brought him to New York City in the first place. His natural tendencies toward rock, blues, and Guthrie’s styles shaped his early sound. The first record was a transmuting of that blend, his songwriting and vocal delivery something between blues tradition and Woody Guthrie. You see this clearly on the debut, and the transformation into the second record was quick, because Bob had always understood the first album as something that just needed to get done so he could get on with what he actually wanted to say.

    Between the two records, behind the scenes, there was an uproar among the money men over the poor sales of the debut. John Hammond, Dylan’s benefactor and producer, possibly with some help from Johnny Cash, secured the contract for Bob to make another record. This next one would be a huge leap forward creatively. A money maker for the ones who cared about that, and possibly for Bob too, who was living place to place and shacking up with his girlfriend. This record would change the face of folk music and the rock music that followed in its wake.

    The Album Cover

    Bob and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, walking in Greenwich Village. Such innocence. Such youth. Honestly, for Bob, this is probably his best cover. A perfect representation of the vibe, the scene, and his life at that moment. That embrace against the cold is everything you need to know about the relationship. You can see the warmth, the appreciation. I also particularly enjoy the old VW bus in the background. Very cool, very of the time. Living in California, I find it quietly amusing that one of those was parked in New York City. But that’s just me.

    Suze was an important piece of the cover and of Dylan’s life. She was deep into the whole equality-freedom thing long before Bob got seriously involved in it. She was possibly the editor, or the litmus test for the content of these songs. Bob said he checked out the songs with her. She had strong left-wing political views and shared them openly with Bob, helping drive his interest in the disenfranchised. Her departure to Italy spurred a period of intensive songwriting, Bob relegated to a pad, a typewriter, a guitar, and a pack of smokes. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalled that he was writing at a feverish pace, missing Suze immensely, working on four songs at a time and flipping pages between a spiral notebook, getting one line down at a time.

    The songs were coming quickly. Often it only took a few moments to get a song finished and qualified as poetry. The melodies came from his spongy brain, his ability to pick up on nuance from the vast pool of musical influences around him. He would adopt an old folk tune and suddenly have his song complete. The recording sessions at Columbia’s New York studio started in April 1962 and got seriously productive in July, where the most distinctive material began getting laid down.

    The Object

    I used to own this record, but it was in very rough shape. Unable to be played. Resurrected here with this reissue, I’m finally happy to have a copy that does the music justice. This is where Bob broke out as a songwriter and artist. The songs are ripe with political commentary and imagery. The scene is Greenwich Village, the girlfriend on the cover, young Bob taking on the world and his own artistry.

    My copy is a 2025 RSD reissue, Mono, an MPO pressing. The album cover and rear cover are original, maintains the original liner notes, and retains the pre-controversial tracks. A very important note: it holds the original track listing from before certain songs were eliminated, which I’ll get into below.

    Call RSD what you will. I often regard it as a cash grab for most of those involved, but if it keeps local record stores alive I’m fine with it. There are a few RSD releases worth tracking down, and this is one of them. For collectors, this pressing offers a real alternative to hunting for an original Freewheelin’ with the pre-removal tracks, copies of which have become extremely rare and expensive.

    I bought it on Discogs in March 2026, still filling out the collection with greats from pre-1965.

    This copy sounds really good. Some of these tracks I’ve never heard this clean. The beauty of vinyl. Bob’s voice is front and center where it needs to be, right in the middle of the channel. Super flat and quiet. Perfect.

    I like this track listing. Not sure I’ll ever need the official, most recognized release with the standard tracks, though at some point it might make sense to have both. The familiar songs sound great here, but the new favorite for me is “Down the Highway.”

    It’s a happy time, owning this record. We all should own it. Bask in the greatness of early 1960s Bob and the world gets a little better.

    The Music

    Blowin’ in the Wind

    Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963)

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence, that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening.”

    Unofficial anthem of the 1960s? This song was already a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary before this record even came out. Apparently written in ten minutes while sitting in a café. The theme of world peace. The question song. The tonal metronome of what was happening in the world at that moment.

    Dylan may have understood the immensity this song carried, or worried about it. More likely he put the thing out there and watched it begin to live a life of its own. It was his first real attempt at moving from reporting specific events to examining the general, and the vagueness was the whole strategy. Scholars have noted that the reason this song works is precisely because it doesn’t connect to any specific territory. There is no specific event, no villain, no proper name. The argument is exterritorial, and by being untethered it could attach itself to any freedom struggle anywhere.

    The life this song has lived is beyond anything Bob could have imagined when he wrote it. It’s anthemic at this point, embedded in the zeitgeist. We make each other feel something when we talk about what this song is about. Whether it’s stirring or inspiring or bittersweet, by 2026 the things this song helped set in motion have lived through generations, seen their ups and downs. When it really comes down to it, we’re still pondering the same questions Bob was asking when he wrote it.

    I love a song that asks questions, and this one along with “A Hard Rain” asks many, repeatedly. Maybe that’s the real subject. A song that made people question themselves, the institutions that govern them, and their place within those institutions. There’s a comment in No Direction Home noting that this song feels simultaneously brand new and two hundred years old. “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a cliché, and what a profitable one.

    A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

    A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Dave Van Ronk recognized this song as a pivot point, the beginning of a new artistic revolution. The proof that poetry could be fully infused into folk music at this scale. That hadn’t been done before.

    Born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A period of intense paranoia, genuine talk of mutually assured destruction, nuclear catastrophe on a real timetable. A song like this could only come from that moment, from a mind ripe with dread about the end of the world and eager enough to put one of his best songs ever to paper. More poem than song, a string of imagery inspired by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of Suze and Bob’s favorite writers.

    Epic. Seriously. Personally, this song has taken on different connotations for me over the years. After watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary and visiting the wall memorial in DC, hearing those first lines is enough to make the tears well up. For me this song is a collage that lives somewhere in the quiet grey between optimism and pessimism. A request. It wants to know something.

    Probably the best thing I’ve read about it is where Bob makes clear that every line in this song could be a song in itself. Every line starts and ends its own image.

    “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son” shifts to “What did you see”, then “What did you hear”, then “Who did you meet.” That’s the only narrative shift. The blue-eyed son: the wide-eyed youth, the wayward soul, the witness to the prosecution. The fundamental newness of childhood bearing witness to the evidence of the horrors and the beauties of life. Or just, you know, the good old-fashioned end of the world.

    It’s the sincerity, the soft-spoken cry for action in Bob’s voice on the question pieces that gets me. The subtle question is the more urgent one.

    Down the Highway

    Spooky blues, right up my alley. Or highway, as it were. It’s bare and basic, working within the twelve-bar scheme, but those single guitar strums that linger throughout are just maddening. Scary and menacing. Hear that at a crossroads at night and you’ll be looking over both shoulders, seeing things in the cornfields.

    The song is about Bob living in the void of Suze Rotolo’s absence. She’s gone to the far-off land of Italy, leaving the narrator poor and lonely, stripped down, nervous, and afraid. Left to gamble and booze it away. Bob had also been getting real thin and loose around this period of songwriting. Losing weight, appearing gaunt. The relationship with Suze had taken its toll, and this song sits in the middle of that toll.

    Bob Dylan’s Blues

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    A moment of respite in the sequencing. Recorded during the same session as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it makes for a little breather between the heaviness of what comes before it and the second side. During the actual recording session it probably served the same purpose.

    “Bob Dylan’s Blues” was originally the working title for Freewheelin’ before the final title came along.

    The Lone Ranger and Tonto: the first characters in Bob Dylan’s menagerie, the kind that would multiply and populate his later albums. Welcome to the carnival.

    Let Me Die in My Footsteps

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Side 2

    Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

    Recorded November 14, 1962

    A breakup song, directed at and inspired by the deterioration of Bob and Suze’s relationship. Bob shoots accusations across the table: “You just kind of wasted my precious time.” He’s the one traveling on. In reality, though, it was Suze who left Bob, not the other way around.

    A song with a lot of charisma for me. Bewitching. Just Bob and his guitar, a real knack for dynamic picking, and a voice he’d been sharpening during his New York years. One of those songs that sounds effortless and reveals itself as anything but over time.

    Rambling, Gambling Willie

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Oxford Town

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Another song written for and published in Broadside magazine, in response to a call for songs about topical events. Bob is making direct reference to one of the key moments in the Civil Rights Movement. James Meredith, a Black man who won a federal court ruling allowing him to register at the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.

    The governor of Mississippi took extreme conflict with the situation. The whole episode is insane to read about even now, though we have to remind ourselves how far we’ve come. Meredith registered amid a mob of rioters, the National Guard, and an armed conflict that resulted in two deaths and roughly three hundred wounded.

    The final line remains relevant today: “Somebody better investigate soon.” A sarcastic tone. Somebody ought to do something about this. Well, we’ve been waiting and will continue to be waiting.

    Corrina, Corrina

    Recorded October 26, 1962

    The only song on the record not originally composed by Dylan. This composition dates back to 1918, a traditional blues tune about a lost love. Bob most likely knew it through Blind Lemon Jefferson, or possibly Robert Johnson’s version.

    The song is indicative of Bob’s deep connection to the original blues legends, and this adaptation is a direct byproduct of his loneliness in Suze’s absence. He wore that loneliness across most of the album, and here it takes on an older, rawer form.

    Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

    Deemed too controversial for the original release. Several of the protest songs on this record were published in Broadside, the folk and protest magazine. The first issue of that publication, of which Bob was a contributor, carried the lyrics of this talking blues. The alt-right gets picked apart in the song, with a great punch at the end: the narrator searches for communists everywhere, and eventually finds one looking back at him in the mirror.

    Dylan had planned to perform this on the Ed Sullivan Show, at the time the single most important platform for any musician wanting to get known or stay known. The censors got hold of it during rehearsal and immediately questioned the song, fearing libel against the John Birch Society. Bob made it clear without much deliberation: no song, no show. He walked out. Further down the line this helped his street cred with the anti-establishment Greenwich Village crowd, but that same fear of libel made it to the desks of the Columbia executives, who pulled the song from the album. Bob had to comply under contract. This led to the other songs being pulled as well. “Rocks and Gravel,” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” went with it.

    Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    Another cover, this time drawing from Henry Thomas, an old Texas country bluesman. A pretty different mood from the rest of the album, more upbeat, though the subject matter still circles back to Suze’s absence and Dylan’s loneliness. A little lightness before the end.

    I Shall Be Free

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    The album ends on a comic note. Lots of nonsensical remarks in this track, almost a politically incorrect comedy routine. A loose, funny, deliberate exhale after everything that came before it. Bob letting the air out of the balloon before he sends you home.

    Closing

    Freewheelin’ contains some of my favorite Bob tunes ever. For that it will always hold a happy place in the collection. I probably heard Bob Dylan songs in my toddler years, maybe even earlier. I genuinely cannot remember the first time I heard him. But sometimes I listen to “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and it’s new again. Every single time. That is the sign of great music.

    He was in a unique creative period here. You can tug on a lot of different threads and they all lead to the same place: a spot of intense creativity, a spot of inspired songwriting, a young man taking on the world with a guitar and a typewriter and a burning need to say something. This was the start of Bob’s rise. The best records were still to come, but this one gave us proof of what was possible. An all-time classic if there ever was one.

    Thanks be to the Dylan.

    “If you told the truth, that was all well and good, and if you told the un-truth, well that was still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.”

    -RTR

  • Etta James – At Last!

    Etta James – At Last!

    Studio Album  ·  Released November 15th 1960  ·  Argo Records (Chess Subsidiary)

    Orchestral Arrangements and Conducted by Riley Hamilton ·  Produced by Phil and Leonard Chess

    Recorded: Between January and October 1960

    My copy: 2013 WaxTime Reissue ·  Purchased some time in 2016. Siren Records, CA

    “That’s why I don’t care to associate with a lot of other entertainers. Its not the drugs, its just that I’ve heard all that jive talk and ego games for too long. When I first started out, touring was fun — riding those old buses, eatin sardines out of a can, white folks runnin you out of town and everybody talkin about it for six months afterward.”

    — Etta James

    Jamesetta Hawkins was born in Los Angeles in 1938. She never knew her father, and her mother was only fourteen years old. She moved around, raised by relatives, not by her mother, attending a Baptist church with her grandparents. She had a natural talent for singing and was a soloist in her choir. While singing at church, she was subject to regular physical abuse. The director would punch her in the stomach if she didn’t sing correctly. As terrible as that sounds, James later related this period as what gave her the toughness to go it alone as a solo singer, and what gave her voice the raw edge that many came to appreciate. At twelve she started living with her mother, and began a slow drift into delinquency and general trouble.

    It was Johnny Otis who discovered her. Otis was a talent scout and bandleader with an extraordinary ear, responsible for unearthing several major artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first song James recorded, “Roll With Me Henry,” was an answer song to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me Annie” — sexual nuance included, racy undertones for the era. It was a sure-fire formula for a hit in those days. And it was a hit, until Georgia Gibbs covered it and scored a bigger chart position with the same song, now sung by a white artist for white radio. This was a routine injustice of the period. Black artists writing and recording the source material, white artists getting the commercial payoff. James’s dismay pushed her to seek out success as a solo artist on her own terms. She was strong-willed, massively talented, and not interested in compromises.

    Her solo career floundered until Leonard Chess signed her. Chess Records, by 1960, was the most important blues and R&B label in the country, with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Chuck Berry all on the roster. Argo, its subsidiary label, was positioned slightly differently. It was more pop-friendly and more open to orchestral production. That distinction matters when you listen to At Last!, because the lush string arrangements that Riley Hamilton brought to these sessions aren’t an accident or a concession. They’re a statement about where Etta James was meant to sit: not in the low-down gut-bucket blues tradition, but somewhere more expansive. Blues feeling, pop ambition, and genuine soul.

    What I hear when I listen to Etta James is a powerful singing voice, even allowing for her young age. There’s a depth and maturity behind that power that you don’t come by easily. You come by it the way she did, which was the hard way. She can growl, she can wail, and she can drop to a murmur in the same line. She has that intensity that very few could imitate because you can’t fake what’s underneath it. The hurt makes the beauty sparkle. And on the title track she shows that she can be delicate and glamorous and pop, and sing with a feeling of love that lands as something rare and real. The combination of roughness and the refinement is what makes this album unlike anything else Chess put out in this period.

    At Last! is not exactly a traditional album in the sense of a unified artistic statement. It reads more like a curated greatest-hits collection, pulling together singles, covers, and originals across different emotional registers. There’s raunchy, there’s blues, there’s pop, and there’s the timeless love song of the title track. What ties it together isn’t the songwriting or a conceptual thread — it’s her. She’s the constant.

    The Object

    This copy is a reissue from 2013 on WaxTime Records, added to the collection, from what I can remember 2016. I was in Arabic school at the time, so it was likely purchased in Monterey or Seaside, probably at Siren Records. It does not maintain the original track listing. There are four additional bonus tracks: “Don’t Cry Baby,” “You Know What I Mean,” “I’ll Dry My Tears,” and “Seven Day Fool.”

    The record sleeve is well made, a perfect reproduction of the original artwork. A beautiful side-profile pose — possibly a nod to Muddy Waters’s debut Chess LP — set against a yellow-orange background. Bold red lettering for Etta’s name, lowercase cursive for At Last! Her face is pensive, confident, and genuinely beautiful. The statement earring might be the entire reason for the decision to go with a profile shot — it adds a shine and distinguished class that points directly to what the music is: refined, bluesy, and elegant all at once.

    On the back of the cover, updated liner notes sit alongside the originals, with the new notes written by Santi Comelles. There are also archival images like show bills, photographs of Etta, original single record labels for the interested collector. This is her debut LP. Three of the tracks were released as singles, and all three were successful.

    The Music

    Songs and Listening Notes — January 6, 2026

    All tracks were recorded in Chicago between January and October 1960, except “You Know What I Mean,” recorded with an unidentified rhythm section, possibly in California.

    Anything to Say You’re Mine (Written by Sonny Thompson)

    A song of longing. Her crying and moaning here is just great. This a beautiful opener to a record that functions more like a greatest-hits collection than a conventional debut. Sonny Thompson was a popular bandleader in the 1940s and 1950s, and this is one of his better compositions, but Etta makes it hers.

    My Dearest Darling (A single from 1958 by Eddie Bo, early R&B legend, New Orleans-bred)

    A wailing cry and a sensitive soft whisper, effortlessly achieved in the same song. Range. When I listen to this track I can hear where Janis Joplin drew her inspiration. The cover was a solid hit for Etta.

    Trust in Me (Written by Ned Wever, Milton Ager, Jean Schwartz)

    A vintage composition taken from much earlier in the American songbook, and Etta treats it accordingly.

    “Come on daddy, face the future, why don’t you smile” — I just like that line a lot.

    Sunday Kind of Love

    Lost in the vibe of this song. A smoothly arranged track . The orchestra layers on the smoothness and the sensitivity with real care. This song sounds brand new. Her voice carries a patented soul edge that is legitimate and real and has never really been matched.

    Tough Mary (Written by Etta James and Joe Josea)

    Going to go ahead and say yes to the background singers and the saxophone solo. Both are highlights on this more uptempo track about a woman singing about exactly what she wants, no compromise.

    Don’t Cry Baby (Bonus track from 1961 — originally sung in 1929 by Bessie Smith, written by James P. Johnson)

    A slow, vampy blues, but with those strings and her voice it’s elevated well above the low-down blues of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. This is exquisite blues. As far as the content goes, I wonder if anyone took this as emasculating to men — she’s pleading with her man not to cry, offering to reconcile and try the relationship one more time. Great song.

    You Know What I Mean (Bonus track)

    This one doesn’t benefit from the orchestral arrangements of the other material — the rhythm section is different, possibly recorded in California and it’s noticeably different. Despite that, it’s still another outstanding exhibition of her vocal style and ability. Real wails here, and she puts a lot of power behind nearly every line.

    Side 2

    I Just Want to Make Love to You (Willie Dixon)

    Picks up right where Muddy Waters left off, though it’s more swinging and swaying than power blues. The saxophone player goes for a walk. I really like how you can hear the air blowing into the mic on certain lines. And on the title line — she starts at the peak of vocal power, I JUST WANT — and in the second half of the line she lands in a place of softly spoken murmur. Power and class in the same line.

    At Last! (Written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren for the musical Sun Valley Serenade, 1941)

    Originally charted in 1942, when Etta was five years old. Glen Miller’s orchestra performed the version that first made it famous, and in its original context it’s a tender, soft-spoken love song — pleasant, well-crafted, and not much more than that.

    Knowing that origin and then listening to Etta’s version is what makes the recording so special. She injects her sadness, her emotion, and her life up to this point into every breath and tonal expression. It’s a song with meager origins taken to the peak of an emotional mountain. Many other artists have tried to imitate it. Privilege sometimes gets in the way of true art. Etta never wore her rough past on her sleeve, but it was always there inside the music, and here you can hear it in every note. The song became ubiquitous and that ubiquity has a way of flattening the source into sentiment.

    All I Could Do Was Cry (Billy Davis / Gwen Fuqua / Berry Gordy)

    A really sad song, and to my ears the best songwriting on the album. Etta gives it its due with another vocal performance equivalent to a grand-slam home run in a playoff game. It’s like she’s singing as if it’s her last song ever. The song could be a personal story about a past lover whoh had moved on. Whatever the inspiration was the result is devastating.

    Stormy Weather (Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler)

    Another sad and bluesy tune, but sung with a confidence that things will be okay. The arrangement here is restrained and smart.

    Girl of My Dreams (Rendered here as “Boy of My Dreams” — written by Charles Clapp)

    Another solid track, though by this point in the sequence the album begins to show the effects of its own emotional consistency. Most of the somber material ends up on Side 2, and the sequencing can feel a little front-heavy with sadness by the time you arrive here.

    I’ll Dry My Tears (Etta James and Clyde Walker — Bonus track, taken from a 1961 album)

    Another somber tune, relegated to the end of Side 2. Still really beautiful. The string arrangements are soaring here, providing a true call-and-response to the vocal.

    Seven Day Fool (Billy Davis / Berry Gordy / Sonny Woods — Bonus track)

    The album finishes on an upbeat, almost rocker-ish note, and it’s a sign of things to come. This sounds closer to the music on Tell Mama, which benefitted massively from the Muscle Shoals treatment, and that real swampy soul sound. Etta could transmute her blues into whatever container the session demanded, and here you hear the California girl who became the South, who became something else again, but always herself.

    Closing

    At Last! is Etta James’s debut LP, and in some ways it remains the definitive document of her abilities This is a record that functions simultaneously as a great blues album, a great pop album, and something harder to name, which is just a great album. Three singles, all successful, all now classics. The orchestral arrangements that Riley Hamilton brought to these sessions are sometimes dismissed as pop gloss. The strings are the frame that makes the painting visible. They create the space in which her voice does what it does.

    What gets lost in the conversation about Etta James is that the biographical context is inseparable from the music. The roughness of that early life, the church discipline, the years of near-misses and bad luck, the things she absorbed before working with Leonard Chess — all of it is present in these recordings in a way that can’t be manufactured.

    After this record and its subsequent success, James stayed in the public eye, following up with singles and performances across multiple genres, even venturing into country and western territory as the decade moved along. As the 1960s became the 1970s she struggled with drug use and lived through some hard years. She eventually got help, resurfaced with that class and vibrancy intact, played terrific live shows, and continued recording tribute material and original work alike. A great career, fully lived. And if you really sit with this record, past the familiarity of the title track, past whatever associations have accumulated around it, you’ll hear what all of that living sounded like when it was young and new and real.

    “I sing the songs that people need to hear.” — Etta James

    RTR

  • Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Studio Album  ·  Released July 18, 1960  ·  Columbia Records CL 1480

    Arranged and Conducted by Gil Evans  ·  Produced by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend

    Recorded: November 1959 and March 1960  ·  Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City

    My copy: 1974 Columbia Reissue  ·  Purchased April 2025, Habitat for Humanity, Seaside CA

    The Object

    This one ranks among Miles Davis’s best works. Before the 1970s funk experiments, before the electric period, there was this — the third entry in the Gil Evans trilogy alongside Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, and in some ways the most personal of the three. It arrived right after Kind of Blue, which is to say it arrived at the apex of one of the most fertile periods any jazz musician has ever had. Miles was 34. He was at his peak.

    Sketches of Spain is an example of what gets called third stream music — an amalgamation of jazz improvisation and full orchestral arrangement. But that label doesn’t quite capture what happens when you actually sit with this record. The mood here is geographic, cinematic, emotional. It’s a sense of longing projected through trumpet into Spanish landscape. Miles made music for moods. On this one, the mood is an entire region of the world.

    I found this 1974 Columbia reissue at the Habitat for Humanity thrift shop in Seaside, California in April 2025. Whoever owned it before kept it well — the cover is clean, the wax still has its sheen. It’s a fine copy and it will stay in the collection. This is one of those records you know belongs in the collection as soon as you see it.

    I’ve played this album many times in headphones while working at the NSA building in Fort Gordon, Georgia. That context matters. This is music that transforms the space around you. Put it on and wherever you are — a government building, a small apartment, a car — becomes somewhere else. That kind of transportive quality is rare.

    On Sketches of Spain, Miles plays trumpet but you hear something other than trumpet. He mimics the human voice with an intimacy that is his particular genius, and on this record he also imitates — inhabits, really — the voice of a classical guitar. The way he rose to that challenge was through total immersion in his influences. He didn’t approach the Spanish material as an outsider. He lived inside it until it became personal.

    “That one is a motherfucker.”

    Don Cheadle, playing Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), says that about this record. He’s not wrong. Hearing him say this in the film, I now operate on a half-confident belief that this may have been Davis’s own favorite of his albums.

    “After we finished working on Sketches of Spain I didn’t have nothing inside of me. I was drained of all emotion and I didn’t know what to hear that music after I go through playing all that hard shit.”

    This tells you everything about what it cost him.

    The Music

    The Miles and Gil Evans Relationship

    Miles Davis and Gil Evans first met in 1947. Gil was 35, Miles was 21. Evans brought a classical and contemporary orchestral sensibility into the world of bebop at a moment when that world didn’t know it needed one. His apartment near the St. Regis Hotel in New York was a gathering place for artists — a room where ideas crossed over and contaminated each other in the best possible way, and Miles was one of the regular presences there.

    For Miles, Evans was something of a mentor — a man fourteen years older who understood both the jazz tradition and the European orchestral one, and who could build a bridge between them with an arranger’s precision and a composer’s imagination. Their collaborative trilogy — Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), Sketches of Spain (1960) — represents one of the sustained high points in recorded music of any kind. Evans brought functional perfection to these sessions. Miles brought the fire.

    The African connection to the Spanish material was not incidental to either of them. The Moorish influence on Andalusian music — the trace of North Africa and the Arabic world running through flamenco — was something both Evans and Miles were thinking about. Miles dove into Spanish folklore, flamenco, and the historical connections between Africa and Spain with the same depth of research he applied to everything. The Africa-by-way-of-Spain line in Western music was in both their heads. Miles made it personal by immersing himself so fully that the material stopped being research and started being instinct.

    The Inspiration

    In 1958, Miles was taken reluctantly, by his wife Frances Davis to see a company of Spanish dancers performing under choreographer Roberto Iglesias. The experience changed him. Back in New York, he bought every Spanish flamenco record he could find. Then he went deeper into Spanish folklore, into the traditional music, into the field recordings Alan Lomax had made in Spain. What you hear on this record is the result of that immersion. This record months of listening and absorbing before a single note was played in the studio.

    Miles always did this. One of the things I’ve come to understand about him is that underneath the iconoclasm and the myth was a serious researcher. He dove into rabbit holes with discipline. He didn’t play a tradition he hadn’t studied. On Sketches of Spain, that commitment is audible.

    Production

    Irving Townsend and Teo Macero were assigned by Columbia to produce the album, but Macero did most of the work. Teo Macero was already legendary. He was a saxophonist with real chops and a producer with serious ears. His collaboration with Miles on this record became the foundation for a working partnership that would last fifteen years and extend through Miles’s most experimental electric work.

    Miles’s approach in the studio was demanding and specific. He wanted his musicians to know the material by heart. He wanted them to read it, learn it, internalize it, and then play it from a place of genuine competence rather than sight-reading. The idea was freedom through preparation. You have to know the music completely before you can let go of it.

    The sessions were difficult. There was stopping and starting. Miles reportedly drank and doubted himself, saying at one point: ‘I always manage to try something I can’t do.’ That sentence is either the most honest thing a creative person can say or the most characteristic thing Miles Davis ever said. Eventually the sessions completed, and what they produced was one of the most cohesive records of his career.

    Trombonist Frank Rehak appears on this record as he did on Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess — a constant in the Evans sessions, and a player Miles fought hard to have on this date, working through scheduling complications to get him there. Rehak’s presence across all three Evans collaborations gives the trilogy a tonal consistency.

    The Tracks

    Listening notes — January 11, 2026

    Side One

    1. Concierto de Aranjuez

    Recorded November 15 and 20, 1959  ·  Adagio movement

    The Concierto de Aranjuez was written in 1939 by Joaquín Rodrigo, a Spanish composer who was blind from the age of three and who wrote the piece for guitar and orchestra. The origin story of it ending up on this record is straightforward and audacious in equal measure: Miles heard the adagio movement and decided he could play the guitar part with his horn. Only the adagio portion appears here — the slow, central movement — and it occupies most of Side One. We can all be grateful for that decision. It is a powerful work.

    Rodrigo, famously, did not appreciate Miles’s version when he first heard it. Miles’s response was essentially: wait until the royalty checks arrive.

    Listening to this is like being placed deep in the Spanish countryside. Not the tourist version — somewhere real and quiet and ancient. It transports you regardless of where you actually are. I’ve heard it in Georgia, in California, in various unremarkable rooms, and each time the room disappears. The middle section with the castanets and flutes is one of my favorite passages. The final build is dramatic in the best possible way — peak emotional impact from a jazz trumpet player playing a classical guitar concerto.

    2. Will o’ the Wisp

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Written by Manuel de Falla, another Spanish composer, from his ballet El amor brujo — which translates as ‘Bewitching Love.’ De Falla wrote some of this material as processional music, and parts of it were associated with traditional Spanish ceremony. It’s a different texture entirely from the Concierto — bouncy, tinny, slightly playful, with a galloping quality that puts you somewhere different. If the Concierto puts you in the countryside at dusk, Will o’ the Wisp puts you on horseback in the morning. Short, vivid.

    Side Two

    1. The Pan Piper

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Based on a Phrygian folk melody from the Lomax field recordings — a shepherd’s tune, stripped down and made strange by Miles’s trumpet. The source material here comes directly from the traditional Spanish folk music Miles had been studying. It’s the quietest thing on the record, and in that quiet there’s something genuinely haunting.

    2. Saeta

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    A saeta is a Spanish religious a cappella genre — a spontaneous, passionate vocal outpouring performed during Semana Santa processions at Easter, sung from balconies or from the crowd as the religious floats pass below. It is street music with the intensity of prayer. Miles plays the trumpet in the role of that voice. He is the lone cry rising above the procession while the orchestra surrounds him as the crowd and the street and the weight of the occasion.

    Saeta and Solea are the two original works on this record, both inspired by Spanish tradition rather than adapted from existing compositions. They are gifts from Miles Davis to his inspiration. That he could produce work of this quality while operating from outside the tradition he was honoring is one of the most impressive things about this record. He earned the right through the research and the immersion.

    3. Solea

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    The closer. Contains a ten-minute trumpet solo from Miles, and what a ten minutes it is. Solea is a foundational form of flamenco — serious, deep, traditionally associated with sorrow and dignity in equal measure. The drums sway underneath, the orchestra provides the weight of tradition, and Miles plays above it all with the assurance of someone who has made this music completely his own. Bullfighter music. Trips to Spain from the living room.

    Closing

    A key record in every serious collection, as far as I’m concerned. This is not background music. It’s not mood setting in the ambient sense. You don’t put on Miles Davis to fill a room. You can put him on with intention, and this record rewards that intention fully. You can feel the inspiration. What Miles said about being drained after the sessions is audible in the performances. He left everything in the studio.

    For some listeners this record sits right next to Kind of Blue in terms of greatness. I understand that argument. It’s a different kind of achievement. Where Kind of Blue opened a modal door for jazz to walk through, Sketches of Spain crossed a geographic and cultural boundary that shouldn’t have been crossable at all. It represents a peak of the Evans collaboration and a serious new direction simultaneously. Both things are true. It holds them without contradiction.

    Whoever left this copy at the Habitat for Humanity did me a favor.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Film Score  |  Film Released May 9th 1958 | Score Composed Between January and February 1958

    Bernard Herrmanns 4th film score as a collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock

    Mercury Golden Imports Series | 1977 | Netherlands

    Bought: Discogs | March 2026

    Vertigo is another film experience inseparable from its music. I don’t remember the exact first time I watched it, but I have a distinct memory of how the score made me feel. Watching Vertigo is like wading through a melancholic ocean of darkness and painful love. It’s a trance state. You don’t know what’s a dream and what’s real. The film is slow and strange, and the music meanders and weaves with it, spiraling, emoting, blooming in passages of real orchestral beauty. As a classical film score it stands up decades later without any qualification. Herrmann turned in something that belongs in a different category than most film music. It belongs in the same conversation as orchestra and concert halls.

    The Object

    Vertigo has always been a special film for me. It was one of the films that helped me fall in love with movies. I’ve also spent time near the Bay Area, and made it a point to visit with my wife some of the locations where it was filmed like Cypress Point and Mission San Juan Bautista. Standing in those places with the film in your head is a particular kind of experience. My appreciation for Vertigo is an appreciation for its art and its mood. I’m not drawn to any specific genre — not especially to noir — I’m drawn to what’s good and valued for what it is. A great score helps one hundred percent of the time, and this one helps considerably.

    My copy is a Mercury Golden Imports pressing from 1977, pressed in the Netherlands. I don’t have a similar pressing to compare it to directly, so I can only speak to what I have. It’s a characteristically European package — interesting fonts, an unusual label design, a gold strip across the top of the cover. The vinyl and the sleeve both have that thin, slightly flimsy quality typical of European pressings from this era. Very 1970s in every sense.

    The cover art draws inspiration from the film without using any images from it directly. A hand grasping from the darkness of an iris — a woman’s face transposed four times in a circle, the whole thing suggesting an eye, or a spiral, or both. Weird and alluring in a specifically 1970s way, the kind of image that would pull someone in at a record store whether they’d seen the film or not. By 1977 Vertigo was nearly twenty years old and had not yet been restored or widely reassessed — it was still in the vault. A large sticker on the front cover announces that it was imported from Europe, pressed in the Netherlands. I wish more European imports in American record stores were that straightforward about their origins. Many stores I visit today are quietly moving European pressings to American collectors without much acknowledgment of what they actually are.

    Before even playing the record, a genuine highlight: the back cover carries extensive liner notes by Jay Alan Quantrill. A full historical and critical write-up on the score, the film, the collaboration. That kind of documentation is exactly what the collector in me needs — context.

    Sound Quality

    The sound quality of this pressing leaves something to be desired. The vinyl is soft and the shelf life has taken its toll — there are pops throughout and some distorted passages that I suspect have more to do with the condition of the wax than with the producers’s intentions. Mercury claimed that most of the Golden Imports series were pressed on high-quality vinyl, and that may well be true, but they didn’t say much about how those pressings would age. What I have is what it is. The music survives.

    The Music

    Central to the theme of Vertigo is obsession, and central to the emotional language of Herrmann’s score is obsession. It manifests here as circling, spiraling, suspending sounds. This is music that builds and returns, builds and returns, never fully resolving, never letting you go. From the first cue through the last, the score provides immense emotional power to the scenes that demand it, and in the quieter scenes it functions as counterpoint giving you a subtle hint of what might be waiting around the next corner, or at the top of a staircase.

    Martin Scorsese, speaking of his favorite film, called the score tragically beautiful and absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning, and the power of Vertigo. Critics have reached for words like symphony and propulsion when trying to describe how the music works inside the film.

    Herrmann was working deliberately in the tradition of the Romantic leitmotif — a technique associated most with Wagner, where specific characters, emotions, or ideas are assigned recurring musical themes that develop and transform over the course of the work. Kim Novak’s character carries her own motif, which Herrmann shapes and reshapes throughout the film to mirror what’s happening to Scottie’s perception of her. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — an opera built around obsession, longing, and a love that cannot be consummated — was a direct influence on the Vertigo score, and if you know both works, you can hear it.

    Herrmann wrote the score in approximately 45 days, which seems impossible given how rich and fully developed the final result is. He described what Hitchcock wanted in two words: obsession and longing. Those two words contain the entire score. Herrmann dealt with both more personally and more deeply in this music than in any of his other work — he went headlong into the deep end and found something there that he had not quite found before.

    One practical complication: due to a musicians’ strike in America during the recording period, Herrmann was unable to conduct the score himself. The conducting fell to Muir Mathieson, which Herrmann resented deeply. He had always conducted his own work and considered it inseparable from composition. The sessions were recorded in Europe — not what he originally intended, and not something he ever fully made peace with. Given how personal this score was to him, that loss of control must have stung.

    The Cues

    Prelude (2:58)

    The opening cue, playing over the title sequence. Built around a relentless repeating figure called an ostinato — the same circular pattern cycling over and over, creating a dizzying effect that mirrors the film’s title and its central psychology. Herrmann uses the full orchestra here: strings, brass, woodwinds, harps, vibraphones, celeste, and a Hammond organ. The swirling figures in the strings and harps were designed to complement the hypnotic, spiraling visuals that Saul Bass created for the titles. The whole prelude is built around a single note — D — that keeps returning like an obsession that can’t be shaken. It ends not on a resolution but on that same unresolved D, as if the music itself cannot escape the loop. Herrmann described this kind of writing as creating a sense of going nowhere while moving constantly.

    A small aside: the note D appears in the low brass — in tuba form — at the precise moment the words ‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock’ appear on screen. Who knows if that was Herrmann’s subtle editorial comment on the heavy-set director.

    Roof-Top (1:37)

    The film opens on a grey metallic bar across the screen. Scottie’s vertigo is introduced to the audience not through dialogue or explanation but through music — a rush of sensation that tells you exactly what the film’s title means before a word is spoken.

    The chase scene that opens the film is fast and aggressive, with the strings playing a dizzying circular figure — the same vertigo motif from the prelude, now at a sprint. The brass sustain long tones underneath while the strings race above them. When Scottie slips and hangs from the gutter in his first vertigo episode, the music abruptly stops its motion. The strings cease racing. The brass hold a massive, dissonant chord. Stillness where there was movement. It’s the musical equivalent of looking down.

    Madeleine (1:12) — The Restaurant

    Marked in the score lento amoroso — amorously slow. The first appearance of what will become the Madeleine theme, arriving at the precise moment her face enters the frame. All strings, all muted — con sordini — which produces a softer, silkier, slightly veiled tone. Herrmann uses this deliberately. The theme is built around rising and falling melodic phrases that feel like longing, like something beautiful just out of reach. No brass, no percussion, just muted strings and a single harp. The restraint makes it feel private, interior, as if we’re already inside Scottie’s head before he knows it himself.

    Carlotta’s Portrait (1:52)

    One of the score’s most quietly haunting cues. Built on the habanera rhythm — a Cuban dance rhythm, dotted and syncopated — which Herrmann associates throughout the score with Carlotta, with fate, with obsession. Here the vibraphone gently strikes a single note at regular intervals, like a clock ticking or a heartbeat. The melody passes between flutes, clarinets, and muted horns, each section taking its turn before handing it to the next. The effect is circular and inevitable and trance-like. Madeleine sits staring at the portrait. The music doesn’t dramatize the moment, it inhabits it.

    The Beach (3:26)

    Begins passionately — muted cellos playing an impassioned rising melody, the horns and strings joining in. This is Herrmann at his most romantically expressive, closer to the lush European Romantic tradition than his usual more economical style. As Madeleine talks about a long dark corridor, the strings quiet to a continuous sympathetic murmur — a flowing six-note figure repeated without pause, creating a hypnotic undertow beneath her words. When she talks about her gravestone, the trombones and tuba appear alone, playing spare half-note progressions — low, slow, heavy with everything they imply. The cue ends with the full orchestra at a passionate climax as Scottie and Madeleine embrace. It resolves to a bright major chord — the happiest the score gets.

    Farewell and The Tower

    The habanera tempo returns. The Madeleine theme returns with it — lush and full, confirming everything Scottie feels about her, the obsession made music one more time before the film takes it away.

    At the tower, the vertigo motifs from the prelude return and begin accumulating, the tension building bar by bar in a way that makes you desperate to know what’s coming. And then a scream and a fall, and Scottie’s confusion and despair are matched precisely by a score that equals both — music that has no resolution to offer because the scene has none either.

    The Nightmare and Dawn (2:22)

    Seductive and frightening in equal measure. The animated nightmare sequence begins with the Madeleine theme distorted and fragmented — the same notes, wrong — then shifts through several stages of increasing agitation. The habanera rhythm appears now beaten on timpani rather than plucked or bowed, growing louder bar by bar until the full orchestra erupts. Herrmann uses sul ponticello — bowing near the bridge of the instrument — to produce a harsh, metallic, thin string tone unlike anything else in the score. The flutes play flutter-tongue technique. At the climax, harps run wild glissandos in opposite directions simultaneously while the cymbals crash and the brass blare. Then the sequence ends and the orchestra simply stops.

    Scene d’Amour (4:58)

    One of the most bewitching pieces of music I know. In the film it’s matched with a wondrous transformation — Scottie caught up in a whirlwind of obsession, watching a woman who resembles Madeleine emerge from a bathroom as the woman he has lost. The theme fills the scene of her entry into the frame and it’s an emotional experience that the film could not achieve without it.

    This is the emotional and musical peak of the entire score. Herrmann begins with strings alone — the Madeleine theme in its fullest, most impassioned version. The music builds slowly, adding instruments gradually. Then Scottie waits alone while Judy is in the bathroom. The music shifts — strings playing sul tasto and sul ponticello alternately, an unstable and searching quality, the musical expression of a man holding his breath. When Judy emerges fully transformed, the music erupts: molto largamente e appassionato — broadly and passionately — the full string section in an unrestrained climax. It resolves at the end to C major, the clearest and most unambiguous chord in Western music. A moment of completion that is also, given everything we know by then, deeply tragic.

    The Necklace / The Return / Finale

    The habanera rhythm returns one final time when Judy puts on Carlotta’s necklace — the gesture that gives everything away. The brass blare it now. Not the subtle, muted versions from earlier in the film — the full brass, loud, inevitable. The return to the tower is built on a slow accumulation: violas, clarinets, bassoons, the timpani rolling underneath. Everything the score has been building toward arrives here, and then the finale follows, and then the film ends the only way it could.

    Closing

    The score is lush, vibrant, and genuinely beautiful. At times it gives the audience pain. At times it helps us remember things. We remember things not from the film, but from somewhere older in ourselves. It confuses us with wonder, keeps us guessing what’s real, and holds us in a sustained emotional state that very few pieces of music can maintain for two full hours. When I put this record on I’m pulled into the spiral. I’m Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak around another corner in San Francisco, not knowing what I’ll find.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (The Original Film Score)

    Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (The Original Film Score)

    Film Score  |  Film Released June 16th, 1960 in New York City

    Bernard Herrmanns 5th film score as a collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock

    Vinyl Passion | 2015 | Netherlands

    Bought: Siren Records, Seaside CA | Sometime in 2016

    The Object

    Film music has a mysterious appeal to me, and especially in horror and suspense. It’s the genre where the finest blend of sound and image happens — full immersion, no separation between what you see and what you feel. And the history of a film is sometimes subverted entirely by the history of its score. That’s what happened with Psycho.

    My first time watching it was probably in high school, early 2000s. I knew it carried a legacy even then, but I wasn’t fully aware yet of the cultural weight of the film or of what that soundtrack had done to modern consciousness. What I remember most distinctly is the staircase scene. The dread of it. That’s no small feat when the era I was growing up in was defined by slashers and gore fests going for full shock and awe. Psycho operates on a completely different frequency. It doesn’t shock you. It unsettles you. It did that to audiences in 1960, and it still does it today. That’s the mark of a real work of art.

    There’s something I’ve always loved about film soundtracks on vinyl. In some ways the film score has become society’s classical music — people are increasingly drawn to film and video game scores as a way to fill a room, to musically enhance a workspace, to just live inside a sound. There are soundtracks out there that function completely as standalone albums. The movie experience deepens with repeated listenings of the score away from the film. You start to hear things differently. The music stops being illustration and starts being its own object.

    Psycho is the horror film that started a lot of people’s relationship with the genre. Everyone has a scene they go back to when they recall their first time watching it. For me it’s the staircase. For most people it’s the shower. But for the full package of this film, there is no separating it from its score. The shrieking strings, the gleam of the knife blade, the staggering suspense of that shower scene — image and sound put together to create something neither could be alone. Bernard Herrmann’s uncanny instinct for sonic suggestion and his close working relationship with Hitchcock made it possible. Hitchcock famously said 33% of the effect of Psycho was due to the music. That feels like an understatement.

    My copy is a European import pressing, acquired sometime in 2016 — most likely from Siren Records in Seaside, California. The pressing itself does the score justice: good depth, strong highs, which this music demands. The cover is another story. It doesn’t capture the film at all — the scene depicted, the figure shown, looks like a poor recreation rather than anything from the actual movie. But it has the right ingredients on the packaging: the title in that jagged lettering, Alfred Hitchcock’s name, the bright red scene, the knife in a hand, the words Original 1960 Movie Score. That was enough to pull it off the shelf.

    Psycho is one of those films that stays with you long after you’ve watched it, and for me that staying power lives in this score. It’s gripping completely on its own, without the screen. You put this on in a room and something shifts. You visualize that something bad is happening, or has happened, or is about to. The music does that work without any images at all.

    “The Knife” has to be one of the most recognizable cues in film history — second only, maybe, to the two-note announcement of the shark from Jaws. Parodied and referenced below in the Simpsons, one of my favorite callbacks. We’re talking genuinely iconic sound imagery, burned into the cultural subconscious. But that cue is only about thirty seconds of this score. There’s an entire architecture around it that most people have never sat down and listened to. That’s what this record is for.

    The Music

    Bernard Herrmann was born in 1911 in New York City to German Jewish immigrant parents. He was the oldest of his siblings and grew up in a household steeped in arts and culture — the kind of environment that produces serious people. He developed an early fascination with classical composers and received his musical education at some of the finest schools in the city before landing at CBS Radio, where as a young man he was composing and conducting live orchestral broadcasts. It was there that he fell into a close working relationship with Orson Welles, scoring several of Welles’s radio productions before following him into film. Citizen Kane was his first score. The trajectory from there was steep and fast.

    It was his collaboration with Hitchcock, however, where Herrmann’s masterpieces were made. Psycho was Hitchcock’s fiftieth film and their fifth collaboration together. For it, Hitchcock initially wanted something light — a bit of jazz, unobtrusive, background texture. Herrmann had other ideas.

    The story of how this score came to be is almost as dramatic as the film itself. Hitchcock screened the first cut of Psycho and fell into a depression, convinced the film would fail. He considered shelving it entirely. Out of that uncertainty came a fateful creative decision — or rather, an absence of one: Hitchcock decided certain scenes, most notably the shower, should carry no music at all. Just the screams and the sound of the knife and the water.

    Herrmann disagreed. He went off on his own during a holiday break in Hitchcock’s schedule and scored the film his way — including the shower scene. When he played it back for the director, Hitchcock’s response was immediate. He kept everything.

    What made the execution possible was one audacious decision: strings only. No brass, no woodwinds, no percussion. A fifty-piece string orchestra and nothing else. The reasons why this worked go deeper than budget:

    Strings carry a dynamic range that other orchestral families can’t match — they can whisper and they can shriek, and they can move between those two states faster than the human nervous system can process. Herrmann used pizzicato (plucking), tremolando (rapid bow movement to create trembling), harmonics, and sul ponticello — playing near the bridge to produce a harsher, more abrasive sound. He also employed con sordini, mutes placed across the bridge, to create what one scholar called a dark, unexpected tone entirely appropriate for the film. And critically, the all-string palette complemented the black-and-white cinematography — Herrmann himself called it a “black and white sound.”

    But the deeper reason strings worked here is dissonance. The film is about mental disorder, a fractured psyche, the horror of what lives behind a normal face. Herrmann tracked that through the harmonic language of the score — cues that resolve on wrong notes, phrases that end without landing anywhere safe, chords that sound off because something is off. In the murder scenes the music is extreme and aggressive. In the quiet scenes it meanders with a grim foreknowledge of what’s on the screen. The tension is never released. You never get to exhale.

    Listening Notes — January 17, 2026

    Side One

    Prelude / The City / Marion and Sam / Temptation

    Very suspenseful from the first note — almost shocking in its immediacy. Ostinato and repetition, a driving cyclical motif that establishes from the opening seconds that something is wrong and will remain wrong. Then it shifts — love, temptation, racing thoughts. Almost sorrowful. Marion is deeply unhappy with her situation and the nervousness of the score mirrors the nervousness of the performance. Herrmann is already inside her head before we know anything about her.

    Flight / The Patrol Car / The Car Lot / The Package / The Rainstorm

    Paranoia. The feeling of being watched. Sombre and heavy with impending doom that builds without release. Cat and mouse — the flight from the police, the wrong turn, the rain. And then a psycho comes. We’re left with incredible tension, and you think the arrival at the hotel might provide some relief. It doesn’t. The music knows what’s coming and it won’t let you forget that.

    Hotel Room / The Window / The Parlour / The Madhouse / The Peephole

    Silent at first, then sharp strings cutting through. Very spooky atmosphere — eerie calmness, strings floating through the mist. Norman Bates is charming and unsettling in equal measure, and the score walks that line with precision. The surface noise on my copy shows up here, which in a strange way doesn’t hurt the atmosphere.

    Side Two

    The Bathroom / The Murder / The Body / The Office / The Curtains / The Water / The Car / The Swamp

    When it all comes to its inevitable, shocking peak. The string concerto. The shrieks. And then the sorrowful aftermath — sparse, sedate, minimal — the music doesn’t release you from the shock but gives you space, long drawn-out phrases, sharp isolated notes, your mind filling the silence with what you just witnessed. And then the swamp, the car sinking slowly down and down, and the musical phrases spiraling downward in the same direction. The whole universe of this film is going down together.

    The Search / The Shadow / Phone Booth / The Porch / The Stairs / The Knife

    A similar motif returns, but with more purpose behind it now. The stabs come back — but different this time. Something more sinister, more knowing. The difference between shock and realization. The first time you heard these sounds you didn’t know what was coming. Now you do. The music knows you know.

    The Search / The First Floor / Cabin 10 / Cabin 1

    Sustained, drawn-out notes that build and ebb. A flow through the remaining scenes, gathering weight rather than releasing it. The architecture of the score is doing structural work here — you’re moving toward something final.

    The Hill / The Bedroom / The Toys / The Cellar / Discovery / Finale

    Up and up we go. The plot is fully in command now, information arriving faster than the music can comment on it. And then it gets strange — a creeping quality before the finale, unsettling and odd in a way that’s almost surreal. The ending doesn’t resolve. It lands, but not somewhere comfortable.

    Closing

    This is a fine recreation of the score on vinyl. The pressing does right by the music — the highs land where they need to and the depth is there. The cover art is a different story, but you’re not buying this for the cover.

    Whether this score works as a standalone listen depends entirely on what you bring to it. For some it will be repetitive — and it is repetitive, deliberately and structurally so. But in that repetition there is emotion and a specific kind of beauty. You have to be a willing listener, someone patient with string arrangements and comfortable sitting inside a single mood for the length of a record. If you are, there’s real reward here.

    Herrmann believed that music was cinema. For the black-and-white bleakness of this film, he turned in an equally bleak and moody score — spare, unornamented, uncompromising. He and Hitchcock were working in the same register, building the same thing from different ends of the creative process. Black and white all the way through. In the end, the film and the score are inseparable. You can’t hear one without the other.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Marty Robbins – Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

    Studio Album  |  September 1959 | Columbia Records

    Marty’s 5th Studio Album  ·  Produced by Don Law

    My pressing: 1971 Stereo Columbia Reissue — Pitman Pressing

    Purchased: Lillington, NC Thrift Store — May 2024

    The Object

    The album cover. The stance, the lettering, the hat pulled low — I’d seen this thing everywhere. Thrift stores, antique shops, tape decks, cassette bins. It’s one of those records that seems to exist in every collection that ever got broken up and donated. Always struck me as a classic.

    The question I kept coming back to was simple: where do all these copies come from? Probably from the dens and living rooms of people who are gone now. Their collections wind up in the local Goodwill or the antique mall on the highway, and there it sits — a five dollar bin treasure if there ever was one, waiting for someone to finally pull it.

    May 2024, at a thrift store in Lillington, North Carolina. I was at a transitional point in my life — coming out of a difficult year, possibly leaving behind one of the most intense and meaningful periods of my working life, moving toward something less stressful and, as it’s turned out, more fulfilling. The record felt right for the moment. Some records you can feel the influence of just by looking at the title. It’s in the dust. I’d wanted to understand for a long time why this album means so much to so many people.

    Why I Own This Record

    I grew up in Houston. Country music was always somewhere in the background — it’s unavoidable in Texas — but in the 1990s, country was a different animal. Popified, polished, a long way from what Nashville looked like in 1959. I gravitated toward rock, punk, and metal instead. It was only in my twenties that outlaw country started pulling me in, and it’s been that way ever since.

    My big three have always been Waylon, Willie, and Townes Van Zandt. But Marty Robbins predates all of them, and as I’ve been learning more about the man and this record, I’ve come to understand something important: he wasn’t writing about his time. He was writing with nostalgia for his upbringing — for the stories his grandfather passed on, for the cowboy mythology of the Arizona desert where he grew up. This was an act of personal memory as much as artistic craft. Whatever emotional weight you feel listening to these songs, Robbins felt it first.

    As a cultural artifact, Gunfighter Ballads sits at a precise moment in country music when something was shifting. The Nashville Sound was taking over. It was smooth, orchestrated, designed for pop crossover. Marty went in the opposite direction entirely. This record arrived before the full flowering of outlaw country in the seventies, but you can hear in its bones the argument that would eventually define that movement: that country music’s soul is in its stories, not its production values. The idealized gunfighter, the drifter, the pioneer. That mythology permeates this record and the man who made it.

    Marty Robbins — The Man

    Born Martin David Robinson on September 26, 1925 in Glendale, Arizona. He grew up poor, raised in part by a grandfather named Texas Bob Heckle, who told stories of the Old West and passed them down like scripture. Robbins grew up listening to Gene Autry on the radio and watching cowboy films.

    He was self-taught. Picked up the guitar in the Navy during World War II. After the war he worked his way through Phoenix radio and television before signing with Columbia in 1951. And here’s the thing about Marty Robbins that often gets lost in the telling of this particular record: he was not a genre artist. He was a versatile musician who made pop crossovers, rockabilly records, Hawaiian music, and straight-ahead ballads. He even tried calypso. The range was real. But Gunfighter Ballads is where Marty found his element — the place where everything he loved and knew and carried from childhood finally had a home.

    His voice is worth dwelling on. It could go anywhere. Hard-edged and Western one moment, pure romantic balladry the next. On this record he uses it like a storytelling instrument, which is exactly what it is. There’s no showboating. He gets out of the way of the song.

    He was also a NASCAR driver — a legitimate one, not a celebrity appearance. He raced seriously for years, suffered a heart attack on the track in 1969, came back and kept racing. The cowboy identity was a genuine self-conception, lived out in everything he did.

    He died in December 1982 of heart failure, just weeks after his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was 57. The timing of that induction, arriving at the end of his life, feels like the kind of thing that would have pleased him without surprising him. He knew what he’d made.

    The question worth sitting with is this: why does Gunfighter Ballads stand apart from everything else he made? The answer isn’t complicated. It stands apart because it’s true to him. These songs weren’t assigned. They weren’t calculated for the market. El Paso came out of a real experience, a real place, a real feeling. Marty Robbins gave this record everything he genuinely was, and that’s the rarest thing in recorded music.

    Nashville and the Recording

    All twelve songs on this album were recorded in a single eight-hour session on April 7, 1959 at Columbia Studio B in Nashville. One day. That’s worth letting settle.

    The producer was Don Law, who had been Columbia’s primary country A&R man for years and was responsible for a significant portion of the label’s catalog. Law understood what Robbins was doing and didn’t get in the way of it. The arrangements are spare by design — acoustic guitar as the primary voice, with texture added carefully around it. This is not a band record. It’s a voice-and-guitar record, and the production serves that.

    The Nashville Sound was in full ascension in 1959 — Chet Atkins was refining it, the strings were getting smoother, the pop crossover was the stated goal. Gunfighter Ballads went completely the other direction. Sparse, deliberate, story-driven. It arrived at a moment when Nashville was going one way and Marty went another, and history has been kind to that decision.

    Of the twelve tracks, four were written by Marty himself: El Paso, Big Iron, In the Valley, and The Master’s Call. The Glaser Brothers — Tompall, Chuck, and Jim — contributed Running Gun and also served as backup vocalists throughout the record. The rest are traditional or previously recorded Western songs: Billy the Kid, Strawberry Roan, and Utah Carol in the folk tradition; Cool Water from Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers (1936); A Hundred and Sixty Acres by Dave Kapp; They’re Hanging Me Tonight by James Low and Art Wolpert; and The Little Green Valley by Carson Robison.

    El Paso hit number one on the country charts and stayed there for seven weeks. It held the top spot on Christmas Day 1959, which is either a perfect irony or perfectly fitting depending on your mood. For a four-minute-plus single in an era of two-minute pop radio, that kind of sustained success was virtually unheard of.

    Grady Martin and the Nashville A-Team

    The session musicians on this record deserve their own mention. Grady Martin played guitar on this album, and Grady Martin was, full stop, one of the greatest session players in Nashville history. He appeared on hundreds of the most significant recordings of the era — Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn — and brought an authority and feel to every session he touched. On Gunfighter Ballads his guitar work is restrained and exact, which is exactly what the material called for. You hear it most clearly on El Paso, where the playing frames the vocal without ever competing with it.

    The Nashville A-Team — the loose collective of session musicians who played on the majority of major Nashville recordings in this era — understood instinctively how to serve a song. One day, one session, twelve tracks, and they nailed it. That’s what professional musicianship looks like.

    The Music

    Listening notes — January 3, 2026

    Side One

    Big Iron

    The song that sets the stage. A record inspired by a firearm, by the American West, by the mythology of the gunfighter. An Arizona Ranger rides into a town to take out a seasoned outlaw named Texas Red. Twenty notches on the stranger’s pistol when he arrives. He wins the showdown.

    “To the town of Agua Fria rode a stranger one fine day…”

    That opening line. Marty riding into Nashville? Or Marty riding out of it?

    “The notches on his pistol numbered one and nineteen more.”

    If those notches all count for bodies, then scraping that first one into the butt of the pistol came with a lot of weight. There’s a whole life’s worth of violence implied in that number, and Robbins doesn’t explain it. He just states it and lets it sit.

    “The swiftness of the ranger is still talked about today.”

    We all know what happened. Robbins doesn’t have to describe it. That’s perfect songwriting — giving the emotional weight to an event without a clear description. The ranger’s gun was bigger, faster, and truer. The legend lives on.

    Cool Water

    The desert as a state of emotion, not just a place. Bob Nolan wrote this in 1936 and it’s been a standard ever since, but Robbins does something particular with it — he lets it become hallucinatory.

    “He’s a devil not a man, and he spreads the burning sand with water, cool water.”

    I’ve been out in the Mojave, near Fort Irwin. I’ve stood in that heat and watched the road shimmer and understood, in a small way, what mirage feels like. I hear these lyrics and that heat comes back. That’s what this track does — it transports you into a physical experience. The background vocals from the Glaser Brothers and Robbins together are smooth and velvety, perfectly layered. It sounds incredible on a good system. One of the best-sounding tracks on the record.

    Billy the Kid

    Read all the books, watch all the films, go visit his grave in Fort Sumner. Then listen to this song and let Marty give the legend what he needs — gravitas and genuine sympathy. Not just for Billy, but for all the young men who followed his example and met the same end. The tradition of the Billy the Kid song is long, and this one fits comfortably into the lineage. It’s passed down through the generations because it says something true: the kid was real, the romance around him was real, and the cost was real.

    A Hundred and Sixty Acres

    Written by Dave Kapp, this is a callback to the pioneer era — homesteading, open land, the promise of acreage and independence. It makes you think about what it meant to work your own ground, to look up at the stars at night with nobody to answer to. There’s an isolation in it that reads as freedom rather than loneliness. Hard to find much information about Kapp himself.

    They’re Hanging Me Tonight

    Written by James Low and Art Wolpert. A murdering, jealous man ruminates on what he’s done the night before his execution.

    “They’ll bury Flo tomorrow but they’re hanging me tonight.”

    Sparse arrangement, exactly right. The production gets out of the way and lets the vocal carry everything. The logic of the character is brutal and clear. He did it, he knows what’s coming, and he doesn’t seem particularly sorry. Just reflective. That’s a harder emotional note to land than remorse, and Robbins lands it.

    Strawberry Roan

    Written by Curly Fletcher, this is a classic cowboy song about a bronco breaker who learns not to judge things by their appearance. By the time Robbins sang it, it was close to fifty years old — written in the 1910s and passed through countless versions since. He treats it with the respect it deserves while making it his own. The poetic imagery of cowboys doing cowboy things, the rhythm of the work and the rhythm of the song matching up — this is what it sounds like when a tradition is kept alive properly.

    Side Two

    El Paso

    The centerpiece. A mini-film in song. Doomed love, a dead man, a border town, a girl named Felina — every verse is a scene and Robbins shoots them in sequence with the patience of a director who knows he has time. The structure is unusual for country music in 1959, and the length was commercial suicide on paper. It wasn’t. Grady Martin’s guitar and the vocal performance make this a timeless recording. It is cinematic. It has all the darkness and love and violence of the Western setting, compressed into four and a half minutes.

    “My love is stronger than my fear of death.”

    That’s the whole song in ten words.

    Two sequels exist: El Paso City (1976) and Felina from El Paso. Neither reaches the original, but the fact that Robbins kept returning to it says something about what it meant to him.

    I spent time in El Paso myself — nine months stationed at Fort Bliss around 2008, trying to find a good time in what was by then a pretty upbeat college town. Different from the conjured images of this song. But El Paso the place and El Paso the song exist in different dimensions, and Robbins knew that. He was writing the myth, not the city.

    In the Valley

    Another exhibition of the Robbins and Glaser Brothers harmonizing, and it’s beautiful. The song is thinner on story than most of what surrounds it on this record, but maybe that’s the point. After El Paso you need something to catch your breath. In the Valley functions as a palette cleanser — the spirit of the song before it lingers in the atmosphere, and this track lets you sit in that feeling a little longer before the record moves on.

    The Master’s Call

    This may be the track that resonates most personally for me. A boy leaves home, falls in with a bad outfit, ends up rustling cattle during a lightning storm. In the middle of the storm he hears a voice — a reckoning, and an offer of salvation. Lightning strikes. The mark of a cross remains. Pretty metal, honestly. But the core of it is something I recognize: there have been plenty of moments in my own life where the test was the challenge, where the reminder to stay true and stay moral came not in a quiet moment but in the middle of the storm. Robbins understood that too. This is his songwriting at its most direct — no flourish, just the story and the weight of it. It stands up next to El Paso.

    Running Gun

    Written by the Glaser Brothers, and the B-side to the El Paso single — which means a significant number of people heard this song playing it over looking for El Paso, which is not a bad way to be discovered.

    “A woman’s love is wasted when she loves a running gun.”

    The title tells the story pretty completely: the man going town to town, killing for hire, while somewhere a woman waits for him. Amarillo and Kansas City both get name-dropped, two towns I’ve passed through on various criss-crosses through the country. The song has the feel of something lived — a road song, a drifter’s song, the kind that sounds better the more miles you have behind you.

    The Little Green Valley

    Written by Carson Robison. Slower, more about image than story. The emotion here is homesickness — the longing mind wanting to return to a time that may not be recoverable. It’s the most private track on the record, which makes it feel slightly out of place, and also essential. Every outlaw needs a home they miss. This is that song. I could see this playing in a barracks during Vietnam while somebody gave the guy who put it on a hard time — and the guy sitting there listening quietly, not turning it off.

    Utah Carol

    A traditional cowboy story song, and a fitting close to the record. The tale involves a red robe spooking some cattle and a cowboy sacrificing himself to save a young girl. It’s a strange and specific story — a red robe, of all things, as the instrument of fate — and it has the quality of something that actually happened, or at least something people have believed happened long enough that it might as well have. Robbins wraps the record here the same way he opened it: a story, a setting, a consequence, and no sentimentality about any of it.

    Closing

    This record fed directly into the outlaw country tradition that came after it. Waylon Jennings, early in his career in the 1960s, openly mimicked Robbins’s crooning style before finding his own voice. The Western mythology Marty was working with — outlaws, loyalty, landscape, consequence — wasn’t a country music trope so much as an American archetype, and it kept feeding writers and performers for decades.

    What Gunfighter Ballads does that most records don’t is provide full immersion. Marty’s songwriting, the harmonies, the guitar, the stories are transporting. This is one of those albums where the concept works completely: you put it on and you go somewhere else. You don’t need to know anything about country music or music theory or Nashville history.

    And the pressing format matters here too. All twelve tracks recorded in one eight-hour session, mastered and cut, pressed and distributed, bought and played and donated and thrifted and found. There’s a whole life cycle in that. When you buy a thrift store record, you’re buying everything that came before it in that record’s existence — all the hands it passed through, all the rooms it played in. Somebody’s grandfather sat in his den after a long day, sipped a cold beer, put this on, and thought about something different. I don’t know who he was. But I might have bought his record.

    Never underestimate the five dollar bin.

    Hank Hill would love this record. Enough said.

    RTR

    Further Exploration

    Listen

    Johnny Cash — Ride This Train (1960) — another concept album, another American mythologist

    Townes Van Zandt — For the Sake of the Song — the next generation of outlaw storytelling

    Sons of the Pioneers — Cool Water (1941)

    Read & Listen

    Cocaine & Rhinestones — Tyler Mahan Coe (podcast)

    Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll — Nick Tosches

    Marty Robbins: Fast Cars and Country Music — Barbara J. Pruett

    Watch

    The Hanging Tree (1959) — Gary Cooper — the film behind one of the album’s tracks

    Any available Marty Robbins television footage — his variety show appearances from the late fifties and early sixties are worth finding