The version I heard was actually just done acoustic, I've always liked acoustic guitar when I'm in an easy listening mood (good mood?) it was the words that attracted me to it Chorus:Mr.Jones and me/tell eachother fairy tales/stare at the beautiful women/she's looking at you/oh no no she's looking at me. The song is fun, okay? that's why I liked it.

the fairly stereotypical genre song title aside, this is a brilliant, totally weird multiinstrumental exotica track from the mind of french avantgarde-easy listening maestro Michel Magne. I'm really astounded by the way the arabic flute-thingy works alongside the voices. there's always a sense of controlled dissonance, wich really makes it stand out from other examples of the genre. The sheer diversity of the instruments used is another attention grabber- listening to this could probably bring you to a cultural identity crisis.
what this track does so well, like all other great exotica compositions, is conjure up an image of some exciting, fictional jungle swamp culture straight from the pages of some old style pulpy adventure stories. Was that a headhunter i saw over there?

It has piano and bass and drums
It sounds amazing
I love it because it is slow and easy listening

electronic, easy listening, female vocals.

Easy listening. Not many lyrics, but good harmonies and beats. A song that doesn't get old.

somewhat of a classic. great little easy listening track..her voice sounds very sexy, and the lyrics are so unbelievably kitchy/catchy i just keep returning to it.

great song. because it starts off in a relaxed easy listening mood, the big paul mccartney chorus caught me completely offguard on first listen. Hasn�t left my playlist since...the demo version is superb, too.

Just discovered this cover of the Neil Diamond song on Youtube, along with several other videos by the Music Machine, and it really stunned me. It's a beautiful soft pop version of "Cherry Cherry" complete with flute solo-nothing like the other songs I've heard from the band. Nothing garagey about it at all, more in the easy listening vein...and I mean that in a good way!

Another great cover version that the Music Machine do is "Hey Joe"-their's is my favorite version of that oft-recorded chestnut.

A nicely groovy easy listening instrumental from an album which is a very common item in British charity shops. It's nicely percussive from the start, with some nicely strummed guitar and Helmut's bizarre sounding low solo violin. It builds up to a full and funky orchestral sound - a real stomper...

It's a cover of the Small Faces classic that's about as far removed from the original as it is possible to be. Instead of replicating the mod-beat pounder, producer Mark Wirtz slows the pace down, blends in all kinds of weird percussion instruments and gooes for broke with a kitchen sink finale. Some Small Faces rate this as bordering on blasphemy, I think it's an easy listening classic

This is a cover of Harry Nilssons song with the same name. Herb Alpert and the tijuana brass makes a wonderfull representation of the song, with very spare instrumentation. This is a song i can listen to on repeat for hours.
The song is really just this guy singing about how he cant live without her, and a guitar silently and spare playing along in the background, until the song explodes into lots of brass and horns playing with him.

Beatles were also fans by Harry Nilsson btw.

I know very little about Hal - I just picked up this LP for a dollar on a hunch that it might be good. It's pretty great. There are two or three very strong 'mod' tracks, and then this, an example of my favorite kind of easy listening cut. It's very pretty and reasonably slow, with nice strings, good piano and solid percussion. There are some vocals, but their involvement is minimal. If I have a complaint, it's that the piano becomes slightly overbearing. But it's a cool track all the same.

A great, spacey, upbeat track by music business impresario Bob Crewe. This is basically just very nicely dressed up brassy easy listening instrumental music. The arrangement has a cool 'Barbarella' sheen to it, with spacey sounds alongside the bouncy strings. A nice track from a great album.

ps. the inside gatefold sleeve of this album uses the same photo as the cover of The Smiths's 'Rank.'

Yes it is the title tune from the hit musical, but this Dutch band played it fast and funky. Kind of like Speed Lounge. The single comes from a five CD set which has plenty of other wonderful garage/pop tunes from the 60s.

This short track opens the classic 1995 easy listening compilation The Sound Gallery. I'm sure it's well known to anyone with a remote interest in the whole revival scene. It's a really beautiful track, with funky drums, organ, a gentle, whispery vocal chorus, and some great jazz piano. Evocative and glamorous, this evokes a swinging party attended by people wearing sparkly dresses. For me, this is perhaps the ultimate stylish/glamorous 60s recording.

This song was ravaged by critics in reviews of the Stark Reality 2003 reissue (it was previously-unreleased and included as a bonus track), but I think it's frickin' great. It's apparently from a somewhat different incarnation of the group and is a Monty Stark composition - not one of the Hoagy Carmichael reinterpretations that made up the original version of the album. It has a naive, off-kilter, beautiful, and bizarre sound that I just love.

It's upbeat psych-jazz with extremely awkward cheery lead vocals. Stark's phrasing is kinda off (and his voice is WAY off) - it basically sounds like an easy listening number gone terribly wrong - but in a really good way.

lee marvin sings! i really like the simplistic string arrangements here, especially in the intro and chorus. lee marvin's unbelievably gruff voice fits the song well. wish he'd done some more musical work, he'd be fun for an even kitchier easy listening album.

"do i know where hell is? hell is in hello.
heaven is goodbye forever, it's time for me to go.
i was born under a wan'drin' star...."


"when i get to heaven, tie me to a tree
or i'll begin to roam and soon you'll know where i will be"
classic kitch.

Interesting Beatles related Exploitation Record with a nice Cover!
The Sound is much similar to the Original Beatles from Liverpool!

Go to http://www.easylounge.org to see the cover and look for other interesting Records! (Organ Sounds, Easy Listening, Funky Big Band Beats, Cheesy Listening.....a lot of them with sound samples!)

ultra-trippy middle east-influenced song celebrating the joys of gasoline, from french avantgarde easy listening composer/arranger michel magne. very heavy in the strings department.
it sounds like it was written for a commercial or something, what with the moany female vocals and all, but my french is pretty goddamn terrible, so i wouldn't know:)

Although I'm very interested in the batch of cool Italian soundtracks from the 60s and 70s which have recently been reissued, I often feel pretty overwhelmed by the volume of stuff out there. So I was pleased to find a used copy of Piero Umiliani's 'Angeli Bianchi...Angeli Neri'. It really is an intoxicatingly brilliant record, and this track is one of the highlights. The musical setting moves around a lot over four minutes - the opening sounds almost like fairy tale music; this then fades out, and some spooky and very cool sounding wordless vocals come in, accompanied by a slick, hip easy listening-style sequence with strings, bass and drums. As this builds, the wordless vocals continue, backed by increasingly beautiful and unexpected chord changes. I'm not doing a great job of describing this record, but happily in this case you can hear the whole song (streamed, real audio) at the excellent 'atrecordings.com' site. Anyway, it's a wonderful track, up there with my absolute favorite soundtrack pieces.

A great, very represantive Easy Listening/Bossa Nova song. The lyrics is acctually Websters dictionary's description of love. I know this song has been recorded on some other Dorough album but this is the definitive version. It has a great female choire and a nice bossa groove. Really a must! The record containes a bunch of other grat songs like I'm hip, The stranger and oblai de oblai da.

The "Softrock Drivin'" series is a terrifically compiled collection of japanese soft rock and bossa nova gems from the late 60s/early 70s. And it clearly shows that the japanese interest in all kinds of easy listening music wasn't solely influenced by contemporaries like Burt Bacharach but by native artists as well. This track by Emma Sugimoto is a delightfully light and fluffy piece of japanese pop and sounds like a blueprint for some kind of "Shibuya-Kei" track artists like Pizzicato Five could have produced. With shimmering strings, harpiscord embellishments, slightly funky electric guitar and a wonderful trumpet on top. With the clear, transparent production and fine arrangement it's a true standout track of the series.

This song is an intriguing one for me, I can never get enough of it! It's one of the easy listening classics from the early 70's and is one of the most perfect examples of the "Now Sound" genre, recorded by a Hawaiian bar band led by lead singer Liz Damon. Interestingly, it is a cover of a song written by Chicago soul songwriter Johnny Cameron and it was originally recorded by Betty Everett on the Uni label. I was lucky enough to find a copy of Betty's original version, but unfortunately her version has never been put on CD.

This song has a delightfully slow tempo and dreamy, romantic lyrics that somehow seem timeless. To me, the song always seemed to be in an older style than its early 70's release date would suggest. The bridge features great horn playing and a wonderful descending bass run.

The original 45 on White Whale Records had a song called "You're Falling in Love" on the flip side, and that song too is a classic, in my opinion.

An unusual sounding piece from a recently reissued Library LP, the overall sound here reminds me of the lush tropical easy listening/rock hybrid which Les Baxter achieves on his superb 'Que Mango' LP from 1970. However, on this track the strings and guitar sound very slightly out of tune in a way which our man Les would never have tolerated. Still, it’s a very pleasant sound, which takes some unexpected turns (e.g. the wild guitar solo in the middle).

This one of the most insanely catchy and infectious tracks I've heard in a long time. Opens with a sparse bongo beat, accompanied by 'mouth percussion'. A German voice sounding slightly like aging British radio DJ Tommy Vance starts talking ('Der man, das Zigarillo'), before a catchy piano riff and jaunty easy listening chorus come in. A fun track - nice that compilations like 'pop shopping 2' come out and save things like this from total obscurity.

You probably wouldn't expect an amazing easy listening track by Morricone on a western soundtrack i guess, but that's what you get here. Except for the harmonica intro this is pure Morricone lounge and it features the most delicate use of a muted, toned down trumpet sound one can imagine. The way it's gently built up is just fantastic and it surely can make your hair raise, it's so subtly but overwhelmingly performed. After the harmonica there's piano chords fading in, then the song kicks off with subtle strings in the background and with a midtempo drumbeat. Wonderful melody, after a while the strings start to crescend leading into a swirl and a harpsicord is added in the right places. This track just melts in your ears like italian ice cream in the sun. Another gem by Ennio, the song was even issued as a single in Italy in 1972, together with "Sonny", recommended elsewhere on musicaltaste.

An incredibly perfect easy listening piece, this opens with an other-worldly, John-Barry-ish synth sound, and then leads into a groovy, lightly funky piano riff, with shimmering strings. Francis Lai's signature organ sound carries the tune as the song builds into a dramatic orchestral pop masterpiece. A standout track, with superb wistful, lazy, summer day feel, rather like some of the best tracks on the 'Sound Gallery' compilation of a few years ago.

The definition of a groovy, instrumental easy listening disco tune. Makes me wanna jump on the first plane to somewhere warm and swinging. Great piano and acoustic guitar accompaniment from this Spanish lizard with a hairy face. And that girl backing choir.. there are two single versions of this that are slightly different and a full length version which is the best.

The finest moment of a legendary 80s UK indie label which fused a post-punk spirit with the best elements of 60s pop style - bossa nova, light psychedelia, girl groups. And pre-empted the lounge/easy listening revival by about 10 years. The Would Be-Goods were two sisters, Jessica and Miranda, who couldn�t sing and did so beautifully. The �l catalogue is being re-issued on CD by Cherry Red Records. Well worth checking out.

What a great blend of electronica and easy listening this track is. Think of it as a trippy, chillin' "A Summer Place" in outer space with gentle male/female vocals, some french whisperings and sparse, delicate electronica intertwined with the memorable, lush string melody sample of "A Summer Place".

This is a gorgeous summer tune in a similar vein to "Heartbeat" by Tahiti 80. This song makes you want to dance, a bit disco, a bit easy listening and a smudge of retro. I can't recommend the entire album - it's all over the place but this single is stunning.

This Melbourne, Australia 6 piece manages to mix dance beats and easy listening/soul samples in a much more interesting and moving way than recent artists working with similar ingredients. This track is sample happy, sampling the likes of the Main Attractions "Everyday," Klaus WUnderlich's "Let's do the Latin Hustle," and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." I immediately recognized the Hustle's melody, acting as a primer for the wonderful 60s soul vocals. This is no doubt a feel good song!

More grist to my mill that there are lots of really good things going unsigned in the easy listening-folk- pop world - the fella that wrote this sits very close to me where I work. A really nicely-put together, low key pop song with a beautiful vocal melody. Available for FREE dammit at http://artists2.iuma.com/IUMA/Bands/Random_Bruce/. 'Sometimes anything' and 'had to be there' are also well worth a listen.

english language version of "l' amour a 3", available as a bonus track on the american release of "musique automatique".

cute electronic pop song about threesomes, courtesy of french-german electro-rockabilly-breakbeat-chanson-disco-pop sensation stereo total.
features some great moaning samples.
the ooohohouou- sound in the chorus remind me of a norwegian children's programme i used to watch when i was a kid. i just love the vocals in this version. they might not be technically perfect, but the french-german accent is really cute, and adds a lot to the feel of the song.

"it's absolutely out, i know it's hippie shit/
but i say it loud, with the three of us, i love it"

(by the way, stereo total are very nice people. they deserve your love)

When mentioning Swing Out Sister casual listeners often dismiss them as forgettable, mere 80s martini pop kitsch. Or worse, one hit wonders due to the fact that their 1987 offering Breakout is still, by far, their biggest single hit. But this is completely wrong. In fact, they're enjoying an ongoing career for almost 20 years, recording 8 studio albums. Nowadays they�re fitting a niche no other group fits in so comfortably: escapist, late 60s oriented sophisticated glamorous easy listening pop music with all the right influences that spring to mind of that era: Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, John Barry, late 60s european soundtracks in general, Ennio Morricone specifically and sunshine pop. Since these guys aren't necessarily household names in mainstream pop culture today, Swing Out Sister were practically invisible from the mid 90s on in Europe and the USA, releasing their records primarily in Japan, where easy listening music still gets the biggest exposure. The Sisters� 2001 album �Somewhere deep in the night� is their most cinematic, most elegant and visually evocative album to date, where the Bacharach/Barry/Morricone spirit is prevailing the most: 60s arrangements with Bacharach-oriented songwriting, Barry-esque lush strings, Morricone-style harpsicord, saxophone, harps, jazzy guitars, muted trumpets, fluegelhorn, wordless vocals, blending vocal songs with atmospheric instrumentals, creating an imaginary soundtrack. The whole album is a truly underrated gem.

Great soundtrack to a sun-drenched sunday afternoon. Birdie members Paul Kelly and Deborah Wykes met as tour musicians for Saint Etienne, and in fact they sound similar with Deborah Wykes sounding like a somewhat subdued, toned down Sarah Cracknell. But you can hear more influences, with all the warm instrumentation in the song (acoustic guitar, flutes, muted trumpet, various analogue keyboards) it's close to late 60s easy listening pop, Bacharach and The Carpenters.

In an easy listening mood today.
From the oft-panned disk two of the frank black francis release, comes this brilliant reinterpretation of the holiday song from the Pixies' glory days.
This version is driven by dubby, spacy trumpets and echo effect, with a lone guitar taking the back seat. I like how Frank's voice is mixed way in front, and the overwhelmingly happy tone of the whole thing. The Pixies for cocktail parties.