ALL NIGHT

ONLY THE LONELY KNOW THE WAY I FEEL

The more I listen to anything else in the world, the more I keep coming back to ROY ORBISON. There are lots of more obscure Roy songs that deserve to be posted (like THIS ONE, or THIS ONE, or THIS ONE - which happens to be a shining example of ), but there is only one BEST SONG EVER and that is CRYING.

LES ANGLAIS ONT DEBARQUE

I have to admit to one of my pet sub-sub-genring ways; I have a deep affinity for songs and albums made by pre-British-invasion-era artists trying to remain with it in the mid to late 60s, or as I call them PBIEATTRWIITMTL6Ts (which is why I don't talk about them very often).
If you've been here for some time you already know I consider DION AND THE WANDERERS to be one of the best thing that happened to humanity.
But there are many other examples of great songs made by artists who had commercially peaked before the Beatles, and whose attempts at remaining current are both convincing and cute: MEL TORME, THE FOUR SEASONS (that whole album is a golden example of what I'm talking about), PEGGY LEE, ROY ORBISON, DEL SHANNON of course, and that's just what's on top of my head right now.
And one day I found possibly the best album of that whole sub-sub-genre: BOBBY DARIN BORN WALDEN ROBERT CASSOTTO, a 1968 oddity full of references to LSD and social changes, written, arranged, produced, designed, photographed and released on hiw own label, by the man I mostly knew for bringing Kurt Weill and Charles Trénet into the American charts. Just dig these:

MEMORIES OF ROY

ROY ORBISON is known as The Greatest Voice in Rock'n Roll. We are definitely not going to argue with that.
He is also known as mostly a singles' man. Indeed, we now have all of his albums and none of them is truly great from start to end. But that doesn't mean the man doesn't have some amazing deep cuts.
HERE IS JUST ONE OUT OF MANY from his lesser-known-of and absurdly underrated mid-60's output, when he wrote his darkest, saddest songs - which is saying a lot when we're talking about a songwriter who used the verb "cry" and the noun "heartache" in almost every song.
The historical backdrop, which explains the sadness and makes the songs from this period (this one especially) even more poignant, is the tragic death of his loving wife Claudette.

On a less depressing note, as we browsed YouTube to see if someone else had already uploaded this song so we wouldn't have to do it ourselves, we came upon THIS NICE LITTLE NUGGET: ROY invited on THE JOHNNY CASH SHOW and dueting on Oh Pretty Woman. Now the performance itself is really unremarkable (why do they sing in unison a song famous for its Everly-Brothers-inspired harmonies?) but seeing these two together is mighty heartwarming.