Song Of The Day 5/18/2013: Roberta Flack - "Ballad Of The Sad Young Men"

Quarterly Covers Report: Back in the first couple of weeks of Song Of The Day's existence I featured a song from the off-Broadway musical The Nervous Set, a 1959 show inspired by the Beat Generation. I'd never heard of it until a couple of years ago when Sony Masterworks reissued quite a few old off-Broadway musical cast recordings (You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown was another). You can hear The Nervous Set score via Spotify at the bottom of this post. At first I thought The Nervous Set's score was a curio, one that tried to capture the essence of a group or cultural clique that had nearly nothing in common with popular theatre. But "Ballad Of the Sad Young Men" stood out. I hear a lot of familiar characters in this song. Roberta Flack hauntingly covered it for her great solo debut First Take.

With that, the first Quarterly Covers Report comes to an end. The next one starts on August 11. Make sure you're squared away on your KPI's. Your window office might depend on it.