Come back, Melanie! . . . I didn't mean it!

Perhaps I did. But in dissing a couple of Melanie Safka songs, I think I may have thrown the reborn baby out with the baptismal bath water.

This is a really good song! I heard Nana Mouskouri sing it decades ago, but never thought to ask/find out who wrote it. We had no internet then, and to find anything like that out you had to grub around trying to read record labels in the dark, splashing wine all over them.

So now, all these years later, it all joins up.

It took me a few tries to find a version I really like (and I posted the Mouskouri one before deciding it was really too pretty for the Safka offbeat style/sardonic lyrics). The one you see most often on YouTube is a very early performance in which she sits alone onstage with her guitar, looking about 20 years old and frankly terrified. That one bothers me for reasons I can't articulate. She looks nervous and coughs, as if she'd rather not be there. I also found one from the Mike Douglas Show - why does that show now seem so utterly crass, while Dick Cavett is still semi-bearable? - but it struck me as over-produced, almost country-westernish, and the song got lost. But then I found this one.

The words are all there, so I don't need to do any of those lame little things with lyrics and photos and gifs and PicMixes! But my life would be nothing without such sad little diversions. Such as this.