Like many people, I enjoy a good love song. But unlike most people, I want my love songs dark and ominous.
I want a love song to be so filled with danger, doom, and/or despair that if a more fragile person than me hears it, he or she will commit suicide by dawn.
I’m more into Lover’s Leap than Lover’s Lane, if you catch my drift.
Scott Walker is of course a favorite. Nick Cave, too. But there are three songs by Johnny Mathis that I think go far beyond the romantic longing of Cave and Walker and into pure Satanic darkness.
Mathis—who these days could be mistaken for an Italian, but really is black—might just be a demon.
“Wild is the Wind”
Mathis did this song for a film, also with the name Wild is the Wind. I’ve never seen the film, but if it’s anything like the song, it’s got to be more depressing than a funeral in Finland. Or maybe it’s just me. Friends tell me this song isn’t depressing at all. But there’s something about the sound of it that makes me think of it more as a dirge than just a declaration of love to someone. There’s desperation in the lyrics:
Give me more than one caress
Satisfy this hungriness
Both David Bowie and Cat Power made darker versions, but they lack the lush strings that makes Mathis’s version so good.
“No Love”
This haunting song creeps the living shit out of me. In the background, there’s a constant wailing by what must be a choir of ghosts while Mathis croons his wicked spell:
No love but your love can set my world on fire
No love but your love can fill me with desire
And that guitar…that demonic guitar! Who the hell decides to punctuate every line with an insane guitar chord like that? It’s terrifying. Gravediggaz apparently agrees with me, because they sampled it on “Diary of a Madman.”
“Come to Me”
This is a creeping and sensual little tune. You can either seduce a girl with this or scare the living shit out of her. Possibly both at once. When Johnny sings the words “Come to me,” he’s not begging. He’s commanding a girl who is lost in some voodoo trance. At least that’s how I feel. Once again, every line of the verse is punctuated by a weird guitar chord.
I hope you enjoy these. Go see Johnny Mathis if you can, then tell me if he still has that demon power. He still performs but recently had to cancel some dates because of a hip replacement. Or maybe he’s just too busy seducing young girls and sacrificing them to old and terrible gods under an ice-cold full moon.
Excellent. No one mentions Mathis anymore.
Lol…I don’t know about young girls but he does a great job on us old dolls!
Geraldine.
open fire, two guitars is a top notch record
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