Note to a friend:
Just listened to Roberta sing it. You’re right. It’s a wonderful reading of the song. And I cannot, like you, imagine hearing anyone singing it better. Differently and arguably more or less as well, as maybe the Shirelles do.
Roberta’s is a mature woman’s reading of the song, haunted, to my ears, by the pain of experience, some world weariness, sadness, knowing matters all too well. Heard that way, every note she sings, every word she sings is just right. Nowhere is it overdramatic or cloying. Her reading conveys something beautifully sad.
The Shirelles are kids, a teen ager, innocent, inexperienced, asking the same question, but, it’s, I feel, infused with hopefulness and the expectation of the possibility of a positive answer. Roberta, not so much.
It reminds me of two Shakespeare plays that I think about in relation to the theme of love: Romeo and Juliet; and Anthony and Cleopatra. Leaving aside that they’re both by Shakespeare’s lights tragedies, the first is about the intense exuberance of young romantic love; the second is about love as a game, emotion mixed with cynicism and wiles, worldliness, knowing all too well what goes on in the world, a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf quality, but love nonetheless.
Some of that to me informs the way I hear the Shirelles and then Roberta.
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