I’m Gonna Be All Alone

Dianne & Carole “Feelin’ The Pain” “Feelin’ The Pain” is a pained soul ballad, but it’d be hard to pick up on that if you tuned out the vocals and only paid attention to the rhythm section. The melody is plaintive, but the beat is all busy Latin funk, with groovy bass parts lifting the listener out of the sad bits and into an up-tempo fanfare that shifts the song’s self-pitying melancholy into a sort of ecstatic melodrama. I’m especially fond of the organ sound on this thing, and the way it melts into the strings, horns, and percussion to get this perfect, brilliant musical and emotional tone.

Buy it from Amazon.

- Matthew Perpetua