#49: Darn That Dream

Darn that dream
I dream each night
You say you love me and hold me tight
But when I awake and you're out of sight
Oh, darn that dream

Rodgers and Hart's adapation of A Comedy of Errors, The Boys From Syracuse, had been a hit, so why not a swingin' Shakespeare musical? A racially integrated musical using A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in Louisiana, called Swingin' The Dream -- with Benny Goodman in the pit, Agnes DeMille in the choreographer's chair, and Louis Armstrong and the Dandridge Sisters on stage -- sounded like perfection. But while the show only ran two weeks (too much Shakespeare, one critic said), audiences are still enjoying one of the show's haunting tunes, "Darn That Dream," with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Eddie DeLange. Van Heusen turned out to be a music-writing machine, writing 40 songs in the year after "Darn That Dream."

I can't find Lena Horne's version of these lovelorn lyrics, though do check iTunes. Alas, here are two other performances, a male and a female: Kenny Hagood and the Miles Davis orchestra, on the 1950 album, "Birth of The Cool," and Nancy Wilson in 1969.

#70: Ain't That A Kick In The Head?

How lucky can one guy be?

I kissed her, and she kissed me.

Like a fella once said:

"Ain't that a kick in the head?"

The room was completely black,

I hugged her, and she hugged back.

Like a sailor said -- quote --

"Ain't that a hole in a boat?"

One of the youngest songs in this Great American Songbook, "Ain't That A Kick In the Head" entered the canon in 1960 when Dean Martin and the rest of Rat Pack starred on the silver screen in the original version of Ocean's Eleven. The writing team that ran with the Rat Pack, Sammy Cahn (lyrics) and Jimmy Van Heusen (music), captured the swingin' spirit with everything from the fun colloquial phrases to a syncopated bridge that builds on its rhymes and leapfrogs up the scale. While this is a Dean Martin trademark number, the Irish band Westlife brought it back in 2005 on their album, "Allow Us to Be Frank." There's a bit of a paradox between the oozing self-confidence of any of these guys and the incredulity expressed in the song, but the snap-your-fingers music and head-cocked-just-so phraseology that makes it work nonetheless.

#82: I Thought About You

And every stop that we made,

Oh, I thought about you

When I pulled down the shade

Then I really felt blue

I peeked through the crack,

Looked at the track

The one going back to you

And what did I do?

I thought about you

In 1939, composer Jimmy Van Heusen played this soaring melody for Johnny Mercer, who was leaving that evening for Chicago. He rode the Denver Zephyr and mined the trip for inspiration, producing a lyric full of longing. The imagery is classic Mercer, putting us right in the car and cinematically taking us step by step -- from being alone, to spying a sliver in the floor of the car exposing the speeding track, back to "you." Mercer and Van Heusen generally worked with other musicians, but they had a magical moment in "I Thought About You." I'm told that the original artist, Mildred Bailey, performed this memorably, but I can't find a recording on the Web, so Sinatra will be her stand-in.