Spring undoubtedly has quite an effect on us weather-ruled creatures. And with the season just around the corner, in the Northern Hemisphere at least (in antipodean countries such as Australia their seasons are uniformly sprung on the first of the month), now seems the perfect time to share a selection of the Perfect 10 tracks to welcome it back into our lives.
Some of the selections are obviously about spring — Nina Simone’s Feeling Good for example — while other entries evoke the feeling of spring: that promise of warmth and new life wrapped up in more opaque imagery.
You’ll find songs from the 1950s right up to the present day on our sparkling spring playlist, the only criteria being that on International Women’s Day 2025 all cuts are voiced by the fairer sex. From Donna and Laura to Björk and Blossom, there really is something for everyone. So take all your clothes off, dance to the Rites of whatever and enjoy.
Happy spring listening, pop pickers.
Ella Fitzgerald – April In Paris (1957)
Who doesn’t want to experience the sparkling City of Light in the spring?
Penned by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg for 1932’s Broadway musical revue, Walk A Little Faster, the haiku-like lyrics of this elegant ode to the French capital in springtime feature resonant imagery (“chestnuts in blossom” and “tables under the trees”) overlaying a harmonically and melodically idiosyncratic arrangement by Vernon Duke: “Well, we really meant you to visit Paris in May, but the rhythm required two syllables,” he once cracked.
This enduring showstopper was laid down by jazz songstress Ella Fitzgerald twice in 1956, with Count Basie and as a duet with Verve colleague Louis Armstrong, and became a staple of her live set for decades. In October 1991, it figured in a rather more private setting when David Bowie serenaded Iman with the song on the Seine as he proposed to his future fiancée, referring to it as “the Sinatra thing” due to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ rendition on the 1958 travelogue Come Fly With Me.
Whatever the version, April In Paris remains of the most beloved entries in the Great American Songbook.
Nina Simone – Feeling Good (1965)
Slightly spoilt for choice with the high priestess of soul, as she did a stark take of evergreen standard Spring Is Here or her equally lovely cover of The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun. Alas, Feeling Good is perhaps the ultimate feel-good song: it soars and swoops, invoking the joy of nature (“River running free/blossom on a tree”), the freedom of a bird flying high. It thrills.
Feeling Good was written to express a particular kind of euphoria: that which comes with liberation from oppression. It was written by Goldfinger lyricists Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for The Roar Of The Greasepaint, a 1964 stage musical with a young Elaine ‘Potato’ Paige making her professional debut in the chorus.
In 1965, Nina Simone managed to unlock the song’s potency. Her arranger Hal Mooney brought in a big band, gave it a swing and a kick, introduced a tingling piano triplet, and unleashed Simone’s rebel spirit in a defiant vocal performance. Released during the ferment of the American civil rights protests, Feeling Good was a manifestation of a burning desire for freedom, and the recording became a template for almost all subsequent interpretations, including George Michael’s Symphonica take, which would ultimately become his last single before his untimely death in 2016.
Blossom Dearie – Dusty Springfield (1970)
Probably my favourite long-player from New York jazz singer Blossom Dearie, That’s Just The Way I Want To Be was recorded in London at the turn of the decade, the set features wall to wall pop originals, most of which you’ve never heard before. Probably.
With her girlish coquettish vocals, Blossom is impossibly vulnerable and delicate, and no more so than on her homage to Dusty Springfield, with its evocation of the seasonal bloom: “Hobby horses play the Dusty game when it’s May/Fill your cup, come to the spring”
Written by Dearie and Jim Council, no one is quite sure how Norma Tanega came to be credited as a third writer. Norma was a black American folk artist and, at the time, Dusty’s romantic partner. Perhaps that was the only way they could gain permission to use the titular name as a song lyric.
Whatever the situation, it’s a very pretty ditty that was used in 2000 to open the first posthumous box set anthologising Britain’s greatest white soul singer, Simply Dusty, which I reviewed for MOJO magazine at the time, Springfield having died in 1999. Blossom Dearie followed in 2009 and Norma Tanega in 2019.
Donna Summer – Spring Affair (1976)
OK, it’s time to come out of your winter cocoon and start sashaying to the queen of disco.
As the name implies, Donna’s delectable offering is about a romantic entanglement that blossoms in spring. The first 45 from her fourth album, the overriding concept was the intimate telling of a love story by the seasons, hence the other dancey suites Summer Fever, Autumn Changes, and Winter Melody, with a closing Spring Reprise. Accompanied by Giorgio Moroder’s Munich Machine, the sultry songstress runs the gamut of emotions, from lust to lustier.
A whopping eight and a half minutes long, Spring Affair was trimmed down for radio and further enhanced Donna’s reputation as one of the most creative artists in pop. The next time she returned, it would be with the song that defined an entire era, I Feel Love.
Strawberry Switchblade – Trees And Flowers (1983)
Named after an Orange Juice offering, Strawberry Switchblade were the short-lived polka-dot pop duo from Glasgow who scored big with the infectious Since Yesterday in 1985. Before that, the debut single from Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall was this indie upstart. What could be described as a baroque anti-spring song, Trees And Flowers was written by Bryson about her agoraphobia and places the listener, however reluctantly, in a tranquil thicket encircled by a Caledonian hellhole.
Critically acclaimed if blindingly obviously Cocteau Twins-ish, Smash Hits praised the “deliciously sad and reflective vocals over luxuriantly delicate music” and deemed it “simply gorgeous.” The 45 featured Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame on guitar, Madness’ rhythm section, and was produced by future later KLF miscreant Bill Drummond, then manager for Echo & The Bunnymen.
Later to be featured in John Peel’s Festive 50, Trees And Flowers has become something of a lost gem that sparkles brighter than it ever did at the time.
Liz Phair – May Queen (1994)
Midwestern US alt-rocker Liz Phair recorded May Queen as the show closer of her sophomore set, Whip-Smart. Fusing lo-fi production with sassy singer-songwriter sensibility, it’s a lyrical confessional every bit as brutally honest as Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English, or Phair’s own debut Exile In Guyville.
As the enigmatic as it is angsty, May Queen’s bounding rhythms slowly build and rise above the brainiac bad girl’s ringing vocals into a glorious refrain of defiance and hope.
Listeners may have varying interpretations of May Queen. One of which is about the singer’s blossoming ardour for a fella. After a spring break, they meet again, probably at a party surrounded by other women: “Girls in your arms/You could’ve planted a farm/All of them hayseeds”.
I wonder if they were Australian, Mr Fawlty.
Björk – All Is Full Of Love (1999)
She’s a little ‘eccentric’ (OK, a lot) and if you try and strike up a conversation with her in the gym after she’s been pixie pounding the treadmill in her tatty blue boiler suit she’ll look at you like you’re completely crazy (I know, I know, but at least she didn’t hit me). But hey, Björk is still one of the most innovative artists of our times.
By 1997, when she released her third international solo set Homogenic, the former front of Iceland indie miscreants The Sugarcubes had been a familiar face to pop fans for a decade or more. Homogenic was Guðmundsdóttir’s first conceptually self-contained album, where all her wildly experimental and avant garde leanings came to fruition.
The majority of songs on the album have lyrics about love and failed relationships. Inspired by spring, Björk called All Is Full Of Love a song about “believing in love” and that “love isn’t just about two persons. It’s everywhere around you”. Haunting, sinister, cold and yet somehow tender and heartfelt at the same time, the spliced harp and chilly strings faintly mimic the brooding, burbling pulses of Steve Reich.
It was also the fifth and final single extracted from Homogenic, and also the world’s first DVD single, which features the Chris Cunningham-directed video where (Björk) is a robot who meets her twin (also Björk) and in creepily narcissistic fashion they get together and make out. Sounds weird? Well it is. But it’s also a visual and visceral feast. More than that, it’s art. Simple in its complexity and its complexity so simple, it’s starkly, shockingly beautiful. A bit like this next one.
Goldfrapp – Utopia (2000)
If the rest of Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain was icier than Siberia, at least Utopia, its spooky, cinematic second single, demonstrated that springtime was in the air, at least if the narrative of its accompanying video was anything to go by.
At its basest, Utopia is a genetically engineered love song. Though Alison Goldfrapp is the star, her chilling, unearthly vocals often defer to the sound of Will Gregory’s dramatic Morricone-esque arrangements, which fill in the emotional range of the song with melodic counterpoints and synth-heavy sonic detail.
A strange and beautiful mix of the romantic, eerie, and world-weary, Utopia was arguably one of 2000’s most impressive 45s.
Laura Mvula – Green Garden (2013)
As ornate and refined as it is perky, Green Garden was the second single from Laura Mvula’s keenly awaited debut album. The Brummie lungstress graduated from the Birmingham Conservatoire, and you can hear every inch of that training in her work. Drawing on anything from medieval plainsong to gospel and free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air and space.
The signature Mvula vocal layering is its tour de force, coated with a thin layer of distortion, as if on an old slab of vinyl, showcases her hushed-belted-hushed-belted dynamics to dramatic effect.
Green Garden was accompanied by a video featuring what the choreographer responsible describes a little vaguely as “ethnic dancing”: the overall effect is to suggest that Mvula would once have been called nu-soul, cut from similar cloth to headwrap-era Nina Simone, Erykah Badu or the recently departed Angie Stone, albeit one who’s written a musical tribute to the verdant pleasures of the parks in Kings Heath.
The Chicks – March March (2020)
Pertinent, political and resilient, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, the release of March March in June 2020 saw the country pop trio dropping ‘Dixie’ from their name to disassociate from the racist ideology of the Antebellum South. In this way, the Chicks centralise their agency as musicians, individuals, and outspoken members of society.
Teaming up with Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey), March March was the third single from their eighth studio set, in which the “march” of the title acts as as a literal call to action and a metaphor for walking one’s own path in springtime or indeed any season.
A chiming romp that puts contemporary issues of gun control, climate change and underfunded education through the band’s distinct filter of country twang and bluegrass in a way that doesn’t feel anachronistic. And its rumbustious fiddle solo will appease any concerns that they’ve strayed too far from their southern roots. Compelling.
Steve Pafford
