RIP Nina Simone.

I went through a phase when her rendition of Love Me Or Leave Me was sort of an anthem for doomed unrequited love:

Love me or leave me and let me be lonely
You won’t believe me but I love you only
I’d rather be lonely than happy with somebody else

You might find the night time the right time for kissing
Night time is my time for just reminiscing
Regretting instead of forgetting with somebody else

There’ll be no one unless that someone is you
I intended to be independently blue

I want your love, don’t wanna borrow
Have it today to give back tomorrow
Your love is my love
There’s no love for nobody else

All or nothing. That’s the sort of love a twenty year old can get her head around.

As the years passed and I grew slightly more jaded (and slightly less impressed with grand sweeping all-or-nothing statements - let’s call this my single period) I grew to love her rendition of Rodgers & Hart’s Little Girl Blue - beautifully interspersed with fragments of Good King Wenceslas - the way she sang the second stanza made me shudder, and the whole song reeked of melancholy.

Sit there and count the raindrops
Falling on you
It’s time you knew
All you can ever count on
Are the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue

All you can every count on are the raindrops. Yeah, I knew that feeling. Sing it, Nina.

Read up on all things Nina (and hear samples of some of her most enduring recordings) here. And if you don’t already own at least one Nina Simone recording (this is a good place to start), you really ought to, you know.