A thick layer of ice slowly melted from the dash of my car as I warmed my chilly fingers, turned the ignition and headed home. It always felt like Christmas when it snowed. I put on Harry Connick Jr.’s We Are In Love CD as I glided beneath the frosted canopy that hung over U of M’s Lambuth campus. As I accelerated, I tore into the fresh blanket of snow before me. Connick’s voice was timeless. When he sang, he embodied a Niagra of emotions with effortlessness and poise. His songs plunged me into both pain and laughter from one song to the next. His music made me feel alive.
When I discovered his newer album months later, I couldn’t put it down.
Harry Connick Jr.’s latest album, That Would Be Me, packed captivating energy, orchestral talent and soulful lyrics into eleven one-of-a-kind songs. Building from his New Orleans roots, Connick blended jazz, a tinge of country, traditional piano and a hefty dollop of soul into a genre of his own making.
With so many modern pop love songs fixating on a woman’s physical allure or gratifying assets, Harry Connick Jr. stands out from other artists by keeping his lyrics clean and his crooning classy, raw and real.
In “Like We Do,” Connick talks about how rare his love is. Not the Nicholas Spark type of love, but the kind of love that takes a lifetime to grow, the kind you choose day after day. The fireworks fade and the honeymoon phase falls away, but Connick’s love perseveres “through the good times, through the hard times and the wild times.”
Connick references the history he and his wife have built. He sings of going back to old places to create new memories. He revamps old-school love and makes it relevant. His stories are like a classic, grow-old-with-me romance which threatens to be a thing of the past. The rising wave of music encourages men and women to seek happiness with the next woman that crosses their path like Charlie Puth’s recent song “Empty Cups” or Cardi B’s release “Backin’ It Up.” Music reflects the morals a person has. More importantly, it reflects the morals a culture endorses. We are what we tolerate. Rather than declining in morality while climbing the ladder of fame, Connick maintains the innocent charm of his youth. Connick doesn’t follow the trend of modern pop that idolizes happiness. Instead, he champions a love that requires commitment.
Connick is irresistibly lovable because he is vulnerable. He’s raw. He sings what he feels and he is more of a man for it. In “Right Where It Hurts,” he sings “You hurt me right where I love, you love me right where it hurts.” His confessions are refreshing. Connick knows his weaknesses and is not afraid to sing about his pain.
“You Have No Idea” captures Connick’s lament as he sings, “You have no idea how many times I think about you, how many nights I’ve been waiting to love you, how much I’ve come to need you.” When I listen to this song, I can’t help but fall in love with Connick. He’s lovesick. He knows what he wants and fearlessly pours out his heart. The woman he loves haunts him. He obsesses about her day and night. Yet, she has no idea.
I remember the dreary Thursday I first heard “Do You Really Need Her.” It tore me apart. That evening, I set the song on replay. Rain streaked down my window pane as I sang the words from beneath my bed comforter and cried myself to sleep.
“Do You Really Need Her” is a mellow song that delves into the sorrow of loss. Connick didn’t labor to perform in the song. He lived it. He unashamedly sung on the verge of tears with a deep, brassy, groveling tone conveying agony that never ceases to move me to tears. By focusing on evoking an emotion rather than a vocal technique, Connick connected with the pain of his audience. This art is dying.
Many pop singers today ambitiously run their voices up and down the pentatonic scale in a song while losing the power to connect with an audience. Singers are driven by the sound of their own voice and lose purpose in straining to perform.
Yet, Connick masterfully conquers both.
He knows himself. Even more, he’s not afraid to show that he is weak: “I’m not strong enough, but I’ll go on, I must go on.” Connick battles defeat but keeps going. His willingness to embrace pain is counter to how pain is commonly handled in pop culture music. The presence of pain is usually fixed with too many shots or a one night stand.
Pain is not something to be solved. Connick brings to light the value of processing pain, the bitterness that accompanies it and the loss that changes him as a man. Pain ought to be felt and experienced.
“Songwriter” is an upbeat tune with a catchy chorus. Connick strives to write a song with the power to make a woman fall for him. “I want to put some notes together with some words that will mean forever. I want to be a songwriter and write a song to make her love me.” The song is simple and sweet.
“I Think I Love You a Little Bit” is one of my favorites from the album. The buzz of a bustling cafe plays in the background as Connick uses playful wordplay to describe a surprising encounter that caught him off guard. “You came out of nowhere, you snuck up on me. You put your smile right where my self control was supposed to be.”
The song was strikingly similar to how he met his wife.
While staying in a hotel in California, Connick spoted Jill Goodacre crossing the lobby from where he sat in the hotel pool and and knew he had to talk to her. “I almost drowned,” chuckled Connick during a 2001 interview with The Regis and Kelly Show.
“I was about 22 years old. I jumped out of a pool and I went up to her. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Harry, would you like to have some lunch with me?’ She said, ‘I’m sorry I really can’t, I have to go.’ I don’t know how I summoned up the courage to do it but I said, ‘I would really love it if you had some lunch with me, even for a few minutes.’ I don’t know how stupid I must have looked at that lunch…. but we’ve been together about twelve years.”
In the end, I guess you could say that love snuck up on Harry.