Primary 1 - “Tonight You Belong to Me”
I’m being sneaky here and using this one song to kill multiple birds. As you know, lately I’ve been counting down my top songs of 2010 (well, not really ‘counting down’ because they’re not in any particular order), posting a little blurb about one song each day. I didn’t explicitly plan it this way, but I felt for some reason that it would be redundant to include more than one song from each artist, so I ended up making myself choose unnecessarily between two songs by Joe Flory, the UK producer behind Primary 1. The other option was his Bowie-esque duet with The Cardigans’ Nina Persson, “The Blues,” which is a gorgeous and fantastically produced and catchy-as-can-be song that everyone should listen to. It’s also a much better example of what Flory’s original work tends to be like.
Despite all that, this twinkling, twee little cover ballad won out mostly because it allows me to talk about some other stuff I wanted to talk about. See, “Tonight You Belong to Me” is actually a very old song, written in 1926 (another bird: I try to write about an old song every week) by Billy Rose and Lee David and recorded hundreds of times over the years by everyone from Gene Austin to Lawrence Welk to NRBQ to Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk. The cool thing about it, though, is that (unlike “All Summer Long”) there’s no constructive historical lineage we can follow that will lead us back to some kind of ‘original’ version. I mean, sure, there was a first recording, but the song was written and performed in a time before this kind of ‘auteur’ theory became a big part of popular music (near as I can tell). No matter how many times they’re covered, songs by Bob Dylan or The Beatles will always be Bob Dylan or Beatles songs and all subsequent versions will refer to those originals. But here that question of agency—of who gets cultural credit for this thing—is almost entirely moot. We end up calling it a “standard” because it only really ‘belongs’ to whomever happens to be singing it at the moment.
The conclusion to all of this is that Flory’s version—basically a demo he put up on internet for free a few months ago—is just as valid as any other, presumably-bigger production “Belong” has received in the last 85 years. He keeps the old swaying, waltz-y lilt intact with a self-consciously twee arrangement—folk finger-picking, tambourine, and plenty of glockenspiel—and corralling bandmate Anna Prior to double the lead vocals (this guy really doesn’t like singing by himself, huh?). Though we recognize the signifiers as those of fairly modern indie pop, it doesn’t come off like pastiche because Flory throws those muted horns in at the end, a nod to how the song was probably played just after it was written. To me, it creates a nice link between old and new ballads, showing how a standard like this can be passed down through the years without having to attach itself to any particular sound or singer.
