#Smokey robinson a quiet storm album mp3 full

It just sat there, in plain sight, for years. Instead, “The Tears Of A Clown” was an album track on the Miracles’ 1967 album Make It Happen - the last song on the album, in fact. At the time, they didn’t release it as a single. “The Tears Of A Clown” is a stunning song, but Robinson and Wonder didn’t hear a lot of commercial potential in it. In his pinched and vulnerable tenor, Robinson conveys total loneliness: “Don’t let my glad expression / Give you the wrong impression / Really, I’m sad.” He doesn’t even need to say it. And Robinson uses that music to contrast against his voice and against what he’s singing. It’s jumping around, doing dazzling things. Robinson took that, and he found a way to mirror it. The song’s bassline doesn’t come from a bass it comes from an oboe.

#Smokey robinson a quiet storm album mp3 full

Wonder and Crosby’s music is a small riot of detail, full of flute tootles and tuba-rattles. “The Tears Of A Clown” is also just a formally impeccable pop song, a song that simply and straightforwardly communicates a feeling. Robinson was never a confessional songwriter, but “The Tears Of A Clown” hints at heavy things beyond its borders. And you also had a guy trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy while operating a the center of a suddenly-enormous entertainment enterprise. For instance: Here we had a popular black entertainer singing unthreatening songs amid the chaos of ’60s America. But when someone is writing as many songs as Smokey Robinson was, you can’t really blame him for a little self-plagiarizing every once in a while. It wasn’t even the first time he used the line “just like Pagliacci did / I try to keep my sadness hid.” Robinson had used that same line on “My Smile Is Just A Frown (Turned Upside Down),” a 1964 single that he’d written for the Motown singer Carolyn Crawford.

This wasn’t the first time that Robinson wrote about Pagliacci.

He’d been fascinated by the idea of the Italian opera Pagliacci - the idea of the tragic heartbroken clown who cries as he takes his facepaint off. Robinson thought that the instrumental, with all its ornate woodwind flourishes, sounded like a circus, so he decided to write something circus-themed. So they brought it to the Motown Christmas party that year, and they gave it to Smokey Robinson. Stevie Wonder and his producer Hank Crosby wrote the music for “The Tears Of A Clown” in 1966, and they recorded an instrumental demo for it, but they couldn’t come up with any lyrics that suited that instrumental. “The Tears Of A Clown,” the song that finally got them there, was one of the all-time great accidental hits. And when they got there, they did it with a song that was already years old. He wrote Mary Wells’ “ My Guy” in 1964, and a year later, he and his fellow Miracle Ronald White wrote the Temptations’ “ My Girl.”īut Robinson and the Miracles didn’t get to #1 until Robinson had already quit the group and retired from the stage. In the course of the ’60s, Robinson hit #1 twice as a songwriter. So is “ I Second That Emotion,” which topped out at #4 in 1967.) During that run, Smokey Robinson and the other Miracles wrote their own songs, and they also wrote for just about everyone else at Motown. (“ You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me,” which peaked at #8 in 1962, is a 10. Many of those hits are absolute classics. Throughout the ’60s, the Miracles cranked out hit after hit, landing in the top 10 plenty of times. It topped out at #2, blocked by the chintzy colossus that was Lawrence Welk’s “ Calcutta.” (“Shop Around” is an obvious 10.) 1960’s “ Shop Around,” an absolutely monstrous banger, was a million-seller, and it was the first major hit for Berry Gordy’s Motown company, which was only a year old at that point. Smokey Robinson and his Miracles should’ve hit #1 a full decade before they did. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.