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Everything Sounds Better With a Choir: A Slightly Different Rate-A-Record
Start your Sunday morning right
It’s finally Sunday, which means it’s time for my weekly Rate-A-Record article. It was hard not posting this one earlier, but I am determined to stick to the once-a-week promise I made in the last installment. Today’s songs have been simmering in my mind for a while now, but it took some time to narrow it down to the three I like best.
The title of the article really says all that needs to be said: everything sounds better with a choir. This is, not surprisingly, especially true with rock music, since rock sprang in large part from Gospel music. And here’s a bit of trivia: did you know the only Grammy awards Elvis Presley ever won were for his Gospel records? Incredible.
But I’m not here to question the taste of Grammy voters; they are about as smart as Academy Award voters, and you know how I feel about them. This is about how adding a choir to an already amazing song can, if you’ll pardon the pun, elevate it to the heavens.
I doubt that I need to say this again, but for any newcomers the whole Rate-A-Record phenomenon on this site was started by the legendary Terry Barr this past summer. He borrowed the old American Bandstand segment of the same name, in which a panel of teens would listen…
