Earworms: The Many Approaches to Valerie
You can spell it differently, you can sing it differently, you can just be inspired by the sound of the word
I’ve never met anybody named “Valerie.” Aside from Valerie Harper and Valerie Bertinelli, I can’t even think of any famous people with the name. And yet, I’ve spent plenty of time in my life singing along with the name. Three classic songs contain those three syllables as their title, and they have made for four classic records. I thought I had discovered a new song by that name recently, but my research isn’t leading me to it – should have written it down when I heard it. I did find a couple more “Valerie”’s that I’d never heard.
Let’s start with the first one I heard, “Valleri” by the Monkees. The Monkees TV series started just before I turned 8, and my best school friend convinced me to watch it. I was hooked pretty quickly, though I had never seen A Hard Days Night, the obvious inspiration for the wacky hijinks of a four-piece rock’n’roll band. All my money was going to comic books in those days, so I never bought any Monkees records. But I did get one that was actually on the back of box of Super Sugar Crisp cereal (or was it just plain Sugar Crisp still) sometime in 1967. There were four songs on the lo-fi cardboard disc, but it was “Valleri” that knocked me out back then.
And why wouldn’t it? That trombone and harpsichord stutter intro with a scintillating high-end guitar riff chock full of notes grabs me right away and then the fuzzed guitar takes over leading the band while multiple voices chant “Valleri.” Davy Jones was the luckiest Monkee, as he had more theater experience than pop rock. He didn’t sing lead often, but he brings some grit to the verses on this one, which I now realize were creepier than I would have noticed back then. “She’s the same little girl who used to hang around my door / But she sure looks different than the way she looked before.” There sure were a lot of songs back in the day about older men suddenly being attracted to women they’d known before they hit puberty. Jones was only 21 at the time he sang this, so it’s a little more age-appropriate of a relationship.
Richard Thompson is my favorite guitar player of all time. I can’t remember when I first gave in and listened to him after several of my friends and a number of music critics kept raving about him. I do know Hand of Kindness, released in 1983, was the first RT album I owned. I’ve never missed one since, and gone back to get all his previous material. In 1986, he released Daring Adventures which contained the second song I’ve loved named “Vallerie.”
Thompson is a master of using just the low strings to generate rock’n’roll power with clipped chords underneath his passionate vocal delivery. “Oh Valerie – you give me heart attack / Oh Valerie – you put me on the rack.” Thompson loves to write from the perspective of unlikable characters, and the guy in this song seems to hate his wife or girlfriend enough to list all her faults. “Well I’m soft in the head, I give her hard cash / She spends all my money on junk and trash.” Once the band kicks in, Thompson’s guitar licks are doubled by John Kirkpatrick’s accordion, bringing a Cajun feel to the song. Clive Gregson and Christine Collister add impeccable harmonies. It’s an energetic thrill ride of a record.
The Zutons were an English band from the early years of the 21st Century that sounded completely disinterested in any musical style that came around after 1970 or so. Like their friends the Coral, they piqued my reactionary interest as soon as I heard them. Both bands wrote catchy songs and played them with mid-sixties invention and verve.
In 2006, the Zutons hit big on the British charts with yet another song named “Valerie.” This one had a soulful foundation transferred to hard thumping rock’n’roll. It actually starts with a nearly Beach Boys-esque guitar filigree which slips into a two-guitar offsetting riff with a thick saxophone note on the bottom. Singer Dave McCabe effectively delivers his tale of woe, missing out on the titular heroine who seems to have abandoned him while he was on the road. Or has she gone to jail? Either way, she’s not answering him, but the infectious melody and chorus chant has every listener joining in to keep him company.
One such listener who loved to sing this same song was Amy Winehouse. In 2007, Mark Ronson, the producer of her breakthrough album Back to Black was working on an album with a variety of singers. The idea of Version was to do contemporary soul-based takes on rock songs. Winehouse suggested they try the Zutons song, and they came up with a faster, more dance-oriented rendition. Ronson was a master of production mixing samples, computers, and organic instruments. This one sounds like a Motown imitation, but Winehouse is the one who makes it soar.
She was such a fantastic singer, capable of bringing a greater sense of urgent need to see the missing “Valerie” by subtly changing the way she sings even just the name repeatedly in the chorus. This became an even bigger hit than the Zutons version. I remember just being excited to hear a new take on a song I loved, but now this is the one that comes to mind first. Winehouse was that kind of talent.
I mostly stay away from Frank Zappa records, but when I found out he and the Mothers of Invention had a song called “Valerie” on Burnt Weeny Sandwich, released back in 1970, I had to check it out. It’s kind of a cool psychedelic doo wop song that doesn’t suffer from Zappa’s tendency to put sophomoric humor in much of his work. There is clearly a sense of irony at work here, mixing the wah-wah guitar work with the 50s vocal harmonies and falsetto swoops. But I think it holds together fine.
In 1982, Steve Winwood, armed with a Fairlight synthesizer and what sounds to be early sequencing technology, made a record of yet another song called “Valerie,” which is the exception proving the rule that the name inspires greatness. Nothing wrong with this, off his album Talking Back to the Night, since his vocals are always going to sound good. But there’s nothing memorable about it other than the sound which could stand in for a generic definition of a certain brand of 80s rock.
I don’t know why the name has turned up so often on records. I’m not even sure that most of these performers knew the work of the others when they came up with their own songs. It’s not even as though they all sing the three syllables with the same rhythms – the word can be clipped on three beats or stretched across multiple bars. I reach no final conclusion other than to point out how cool it is to know most of these records.
My first best friend was called Janie but named Valerie. We were babies together, toddlers, little kids, up until puberty when being friends meant something else. In high school she went by Valerie and met the man she married (my best friend in grade school, Tim) only knew her as Valerie!
Lawyer-er-er-er !