Carsie Blanton‘s sexy, enigmatic vocals are ideally suited to the American popular songbook, a.k.a. pop music written for adults in the age before youth so thoroughly dominated popular culture. She treats each note like another flirtatious look towards the object of her affection as the lazy notes flutter down gently and easy. Like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Fred Astaire, she pays careful attention to the dramatic phrasing of each word. Impressive and leaves the listener wanting for much more.
Blanton tells PopMatters, “I first heard this song on Nina Simone’s 1964 record, Broadway, Blues and Ballads. It’s one of Cole Porter’s deep cuts. written for Marlene Dietrich to sing in the 1950 Hitchcock film Stage Fright. It seems to have fallen off the face of music until Nina resurrected it.” She elaborates on Cole Porter’s influence on her as an artist, “Cole Porter is a big inspiration of mine for many reasons, but chiefly, for his rhymes. I love a perfect rhyme (that is, a rhyme where the phonemes match perfectly, like “blue” and “glue”), but I love them best when the rhyming words are spelled differently (like “blue” and “stew”.) This song brings us a shining example of this sort of rhyme: “My poor heart is achin’/to bring home some bacon/but if I find myself alone and forsaken…” Three perfect rhymes! Three different spellings! This makes my heart skip a beat. They just don’t make ’em like this anymore, folks.”
Indeed not. Not Old, Not New releases June 24th and was produced by Grammy-winning producer John Porter in New Orleans and features many top players from New Orleans, including Ellis Marsalis among others.