It’s got to be sunny to me

Louis Armstrong – Jeepers Creepers
(from The Majestic Years)

Al Bowlly – It’s Great To Be In Love
(from The Al Bowlly Story) 

Though I’m generally not one for beaches and sunsets and the great outdoors and all that, it is a realm lush with metaphorical possibilities for describing that woozy internal feeling we call love.  So, on days like today when it’s treacherously cold outside, it’s nice to have a warm mix of cheeky love songs to bring us into the month of May. (Temptations? “My Girl”? What? No, didn’t work? Nevermind…)  Or better yet, as Louis Armstrong puts it, “I don’t care how the weatherman points when the weatherman points to gloomy, it’s got to be sunny to me when your eyes look into mine.”  Egads!  I can hear a collective groan go out across the internet music community – those lyrics are so schmaltzy, and what could possibly be more schmaltzy than Louis Armstrong love songs on Valentine’s Day?  Well for starters, Al Bowlly, pre-war Great Britain’s answer to Bing Crosby, whose voice simply drips with sap and saccharine to the modern listeners’ ears, which have unfortunately become acclimated to love songs sung with brazen earnestness or permeated with pheromones.  But to our ears, sweetness is sincerity, and we don’t mind having our soft spots quiver like jam preserves.

When the horns start to send the snare drum scuttling on “It’s Great To Be In Love,” it’s as if lazy Cupid lobbed his arrow into your posterior, jolting you out of your peaceable, gray existence to send you traipsing through the loony technicolor realization that “the skies are always sunny and life is sweet as honey” because “it’s great to be in love.”  How simple is that.  Love, what a crazy thing.  It leaves you knock-kneed, starry-eyed, and out of touch with reality.  Bowlly is so unbelievably cheery in his adulation of love that he could practically reach his hand into a nearby snow mound and pull out a fistful of brightly colored gerber daisies, and when the violin comes soaring in I can almost imagine a nestful of blue Robin’s eggs hatching, with the young chicks whistling in harmony, perched on their icy branch.  Of course, that’s just the song getting away with me.  How silly of me.  But at the very least, I feel a Chico Marx impression is in order, adjusting my necktie to sound of the clarinets and lollygagging about after a fine, loveable lass. And, believe me, this fantasy is a much more preferable vision compared to unplowed, sleet-covered streets outside my window at this moment.

-Posted by Todd