1965 OMAs: Album of the Year
Album of the Year
People, Barbra Streisand
Totally worth a listen
- Getz/Gilberto, Stan Getz & João Gilberto (with Astrud Gilberto & Antonio Carlos Jobim)
If you only listen to one song: Moon River, Henry Mancini
Henry Mancini
1965 is Henry Mancini's last Album of the Year nomination. He's responsible for the Peter Gunn theme, The Pink Panther theme, and "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's. There's a decent chance you'll recognize all three songs.
Henry Mancini is a talented composer. He made some good music, much of which I quite like. That said, over the course of 7 years, he had 4 albums nominated for Album of the Year, with 1 victory; none of those albums are "the best" at any particular thing, or in any particular way.
It feels like anything those albums did well, there were contemporary albums and artists doing those things better.
In my better moments I can appreciate that it's the Grammys' and public's response to Mancini[1] that I find distasteful and not him personally or as an artist: he's just a dude who made music, some of it quite good, and at least three tunes that are iconic.
To go into any real depth on the matter is to launch myself into a rabbit hole I have neither time nor energy to navigate. Instead, here are two songs from The Pink Panther soundtrack, which was Mancini's last AotY nomination: "Champagne and Quail" and "It Had Better Be Tonight".
Barbra For The Win
Three good things about the album People:
- I like the way the album is crafted. I couldn't tell you many of the individual songs on it, but the experience of listening to the album is pretty great.
- I love the song "When In Rome (I Do As The Romans Do)". It's capricious and fun and flirty. It's the sort of song that inspires laughter and singing-along and sliding on hardwood floors... at least in this home.[2]
- I'm almost certain I hadn't heard a recorded version of the song "People" prior to this project, and yet I definitely knew the song "People".
The 1965 nominees for Album of the Year
- Cotton Candy, Al Hirt
- Funny Girl: Original Broadway Cast, Various Artists (music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill)
- Getz/Gilberto, Stan Getz & João Gilberto
- People, Barbra Streisand
- The Pink Panther, Henry Mancini
Featured songs from this post: Spotify
The current One Man Academy (OMA) project is listening to the Grammy's Album of the Year nominees and re-choosing winners, absent of historical context.
All previous OMA Album of the Year Winners
And, I suppose, their responses to those other, and in my opinion more worthy, artists and albums. ↩︎
And then she kneecaps the song on the very last word of the last lyric. It bothers me less on this tune than it did on "My Honey's Loving Arms", but still... ↩︎