Moments To Remember by The Four Lads (#3 in 1955)

The Four Lads’ “Moments to Remember” is the asymptote for maudlin-ness. The Victrola-Era harmonies and no arrangement simply force the listener to focus on the lyrics, but these are rooted in the past. This is a song that is about things we’ll always remember, but this song is so soft-focused it becomes a flashback. Great songs (especially rock songs) focus on here and now in the song-world. And who cites “the day we tore the goal post down” and “the ballroom prize we almost won” on their top memories list? The Lads do their best but their material stinks.

Comments

[John Sams]

FYI - A Dallas Reporter's story was picked up
by WSJ that would interest you. The article is on the rising popularity of downloading singles and how it is proving detrimental to what musicians - and the author, to a degree - determine to be the basis of the music industry. It is a subject that I assume you could sound off on pretty nicely.

[John Sams]

Sorry. They consider the basis of the music industry to be albums. Sean may agree, to be sure, but he's wrong.

[Sean]

No, I'm happy with the supremacy of singles. I would argue that

% The single is often not the best track on an album, and that
% The single and the success it engenders allows the artist the financial freedom to engage in artistic pursuits that would never result in marketable singles (probably the point of the WSJ story; does it use the supposition that in an albumless world, the Beatles' late output would be all McCartney and no Lennon? That's a common argument here)

but the truth of the matter is, the ability to buy an album a song at a time benefits those artists who specialize in singles and whose albums are always dogs, while also benefitting album artists by allowing people to experience whatever they want to experience. If you hear that a non-single track on an album is good, but you want to hear it for yourself -- now you can. And I think, all in all, the percentage of people who would pay a little to do that multiplied by the little they would have to pay is much larger than the percentage who would blindly commit funds to a whole album multiplied by the lot they would have to pay.