DISCOVER 365: Day 363

Artist: Nina Simone
Album: Silk & Soul


On the eve of Christmas, I was doing my best to come up with an album with something close to a holiday spirit. Unfortunately, nothing stuck out initially so I had to play six degrees to Christmas with my collection. Walk with me.

Over the past two days, I've watched a movie called "Barney's Version" almost two whole times if you count all the starts and stops. The movie stars Paul Giamatti as a television producer and follows him through three marriages and all the years, friendship, and family that overlapped. It's a really great movie that I fully recommend if you have a few hours to kill and aren't looking to feel good for the two hours after. Giamatti has this way of coming across so believable no matter what type of character he's playing.

So we start with the movie I've been watching and we move on to a song inside of it, a version of the song "Turn Me On" that I had never heard before. I'll fully admit that I'm very partial to this song because of the way Norah Jones makes it seems so innocent and so sexual all at the same time in the version she placed on her debut album, Come Away with Me. However, this take on the song in "Barney's Version" was something like I had never heard before - it was bluesy and raw and I wasn't even sure if all the notes were being sung in key. But the simplicity in the delivery made the simplicity in the lyrics make even more sense and you just felt like you could understand exactly what the original author of these lyrics was feeling.

That delivery was also a mystery to me. I'm not afraid to admit my lack of expertise in both pre- and post-Civil Rights era soul music, as I always seem to be amazed by some track I had never heard before and am always surprised that an abundance of this style that I love so much could exist without me knowing all about it: Donny Hathaway, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, etc., etc. Thanks to Uncle Google, I was able to pin down that the singer was actually a woman and was a name that I had heard before as an influence of many other artists: Nina Simone. As I stated in the initial post, albums bought prior to the post can qualify for this countdown so I purchased her 1967 Silk & Soul that included this wonderful version of "Turn Me On." 


This album is racially charged while staying as smooth as you could imagine. These kind of albums make you realize why vinyl record players and Sunday afternoons are allowed to exist simultaneously - you just want to drop the needle and let the record make you feel like a smarter person. From the key track, "Turn Me On," to the familiar Burt Bacharach track, "The Look of Love," to the segregation through the eyes of a child song, "The Turning Point," this album seems to feel like a great sample of how almost every great soul album of this time was blueprinted. It's impressions like this that usually lead me to owning more than one album from an artist.

Year Released: 1967

# of Tracks: 12

Label: RCA Victor

Best Lyric: "My hi-fi's waiting for a new tune; and my glass is waiting for some fresh ice cubes" - Turn Me On

Best Track: "Turn Me On"

Anyway, back to the Christmas connection. The song "Turn Me On" was not only on Norah Jones' debut album, but also part of a great, but slightly awkward, scene in the what-I-consider-to-be-a-Christmas classic movie, "Love Actually." A quick rule as a sidenote: Don't EVER compare Love Actually to Valentine's Day or, what I can only imagine is a heap of garbage, New Year's Eve. They don't exist in the same dimension. Their only similarity is a big cast and a holiday. And the following people are not in Love Actually: Jessica Biel, Queen Latifah, George Lopez, Katherine Heigl, or Jon Bon Jovi. The prosecution rests.

This connection allows me to link to the great scene in that movie that put a little bit of hope back in the heart of every out-of-luck guy out there and a scene that I feel cements the movie as the classic it now is. Who hasn't used the line, "It's Christmas and at Christmas you tell the truth" after watching this movie? And, as an added plus, it's kind of rare to see Keira Knightley in a movie set in the present and the guy from "Walking Dead" not wearing a deputy's uniform and chased by dead people:

Merry Christmas to all and to all a goodnight!!