Word: songfulness
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...songwriters had been there before. Gaudio was writing blame 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...
...Even the group's early songs, the ones you sang along with but never really listened to, have parents in them. The singer in "Sherry" tells the girl, "You better ask your mama"; the one in "Big Girls Don't Cry" (kind of downer sequel to the first song) gets news about the girl's heartbreak from her mother: "Shame on you, your mama said. / Shame on you, you're cryin...
...Sherry. In structure, there's nothing new here: a straightforwardly perky wooing song with a girl's name (cf. Randy and the Rainbows' "Denise") and a tempo close to the 1957 Maurice Williams "Stay." A boy invites a girl to "come, come, come out tonight ... to my Twist party," The percussion was the soon-to-be-familiar Seasons combination of hand-claps and marching feet that lent a military air to the enterprise. The unique element, of course, was Valli's voice, stretching two words into ten aching, urgent syllables ("Sheh...
...Girls Don't Cry. A big advance. The second song for one-hit wonders was typically a less appealing copy of the first. This one tells a story; it moves from a description of an event to a poignant revelation. The boy has told his girl their affair is over, and she takes it, so to speak, like a man: "big girls don't cry." The boy has second thoughts ("Maybe I was cruel [actually, "ca-roo-oo-ool"]/ Maybe I'm a fool") and learns from her mother that the girl was "cryin' in bed," devastated despite her stoic...
...bongo riffs that began "Sherry" and "Big Girls Don't Cry" give way to a fusillade of snare-drum aggression: a declaration of the war between the sexes. On his third try, Gaudio found a narrative use for the tramp-tramp-tramp beat of the first two songs: I'm gonna march right out of your heart. Valli's falsetto croons a pretty, otherworldly air while the other Seasons bark out, "Walk! Walk! Walk! Walk!" In three series of this long march (played at the beginning, middle and end, and expending more than half of the 2 minute, 15 second...