Word: singers
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...though, had been singing that way, professionally, for about a decade, and the group had been together nearly that long, without getting very far. The "sound" needed songs to encase it, bring out the power and drama behind its freakishness. In the early '60s-before the blooming of the singer-songwriter, before performers were routinely called artists, before the unit of music was an album-groups relied on songwriters and producers to give them hit singles. The Drifters had Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller producing their hits, and a gang of young pros in the Brill Building (Goffin and King...
...musical to hear good music that will soon be familiar to the rest of the world, what do you go for? Good old familiar music. Hence Jersey Boys, which recounts the career of the '60s vocal quartet the Four Seasons and their tenor-falsetto lead singer Frankie Valli...
...Start with The Voice. The Four Seasons' sound begins with Valli, who functioned as both the lead tenor and the falsetto backup singer; he told the story and provided the color. What astonished immediately and lastingly was the power of his glass-shattering, dog-dementing falsetto (often multiplied on record by having him dupe his solos on a second track). First time around, hearing "Sherry," listeners may have thought it was a gag. Sometimes he used it for fun, in high-pitched baby talk, as George Rock's comic falsetto had for the vocal in Spike Jones' 1947 novelty...
...songs long before he hooked up with the Seasons. "I cried for you, now cry for me ... You made a fool of me, so now I'm leavin' you." And Crewe's "Silhouettes," written with Frank Slay, Jr., is an early rock-'n-roll story song, in which the singer pines that he's seen his girl kiss another guy behind her drawn windowshade. His furious knocks on the building's door are answered by a stranger, who "said to my shock / 'You're on the wrong block.'" Finally he rushes back to the girl he now realizes was faithful...
...hard and fast" and pleads for his girlfriend's forgiveness. "Workin' My Way Back to You": guy wants a second, maybe a last, chance to revive "the happiness that died." ("I let it get away. / Been payin' every day.") Or, in "Marlena," "Ronnie" and "Girl Come Running," the singer knows that his beloved has cheated on him, let him down, left him, but he still loves her and wants her back...