Dream Street

About

For her 1957 LP <i>Dream Street</i>, Peggy Lee employed the estimable Sy Oliver, who'd arranged many of Ella Fitzgerald’s Decca sessions in the '40s and early '50s. Lee was an expert when it came to setting a mood, and the opening lines of “Street of Dreams” (written in 1932 by Victor Young and Sam M. Lewis) are emblematic of her music career: “Come on and trade in your old dreams for new/Your new dreams for old/I know where they’re bought/I know where they’re sold.” Few singers embodied the ephemeral nature of memory like Lee, whose voice was a substance that seemed to exist in the ether, like smoke or steam. Unlike many of her vocalist contemporaries, she was highly self-directed and unusually creative and adventurous when it came to arrangements. One innovation of <i>Dream Street</i> was the recurrence of the opening bars of “Street of Dreams,” which appear at the start of other songs as a sort of echo. This motif gives the album a haunting continuity and reflects the cyclical design of memory travel, the kind of journey for which Lee serves as an ethereal guide.

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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