Melissa Errico’s Lush ‘Dream’ World Redefines the Great American Songbook

Melissa Errico with Tedd Firth“I Can Dream, Can’t I?”(Three Graces Music)What does she do when she’s in Rome or in Spain? Or saying farewell to France? Well, for reasons she can’t explain, even though she’s faithful to her unnamed significant other — the whole song “When In Rome (I Do As the Romans Do)” is sung in the first person — she insists on having the occasional one-shot tryst with local European randos. But sweetheart, it doesn’t mean anything, so don’t take it too seriously. Like Lois in “Kiss Me, Kate,” she’s always true to her “darling” in “her fashion,” whatever that might mean, no matter how many sable coats and Paris hats are extended in her direction. Despite what she tells us at the outset, she actually does a highly credible job of explaining it to us.“When in Rome,” a 1962 song by Carolyn Leigh and Cy Coleman is just the first of 14 on Melissa Errico’s new album, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” a set of duets with her pianist and musical director, the remarkable Tedd Firth. This teaming of a star singer and virtuoso pianist was suggested by “Beauty and the Beat!” by the once-in-a-lifetime meeting of Peggy Lee and George Shearing. The cover artwork here echoes that of the classic 1959 album, and Ms. Errico revives Lee’s own composition, “There’ll Be Another Spring,” in her memory.Ms. Errico launched the new album with a six-show run at Birdland over Valentine’s Day weekend. On one level, the album format is the simplest imaginable, just voice and piano in largely spontaneous arrangements that were largely conceived on the actual date. And yet, like “When in Rome,” each track is richly complex and nuanced. You get the feeling that a song isn’t worth their time unless it’s able to somehow express two completely different, and usually entirely inapposite, ideas at once.Take the title song by Sammy Fain and Irvin Kahal. “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” was first heard in 1937; there’s a lovely vintage version by Helen Humes with Harry James and his Orchestra. The song became a major hit 12 years later in a record by the world-famous Andrews Sisters that isn’t really the Andrews Sisters but Patty Andrews singing solo accompanied by Gordon Jenkins’s orchestra with Maxene and LaVerne Andrews doing back-up. As Ms. Errico delineates the lyric, she tells us about the idealized state of dreaming, how even the loveliest dream is compromised by the biting sting of cruel reality consistently hovering nearby. There’s even a kind of defensiveness about the song; the singer knows she’ll never get the love she wants, so she rationalizes that her dreams become a kind of a substitute. Kahal’s text isn’t exactly that of a poet, but lines like, “For dreams are just like wine / And I am drunk with mine” suggest someone who’s at least read Byron and Browning. “Dancing on the Ceiling” brings us a woman who is visited — haunted is a better word—by a lover who isn’t actually there. Is he a ghost? A memory? A hallucination? Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers don’t actually say. But he is somehow, mysteriously there, and his presence is so real that she feels the urge to hide from him, secluding herself below her counterpane. And despite having heard this song so many times, this was the first occasion when I realized that I do not actually know what a “counterpane” is. (Look it up. It’s not what you might think.)Then too, there’s even more duplicity encoded into the firmware in “All in Fun” and “Both Sides Now.” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “All in Fun” anticipates Rodgers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book” in that it effectively makes two lovers of friends. In reality, this is even more of a pipe dream than anything in “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” Once again, Ms. Errico and her paramour simultaneously exist in two spaces, or at least two distinct zones, the friend zone and the erogenous zone.Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” was sung by virtually everyone from Judy Collins to Frank Sinatra (a rare disappointing interpretation from the Chairman) before the composer herself gave us the definitive version in 1999 at the age of 56. Coincidentally, this is the age Ms. Errico will turn next month. Ms. Mitchell’s recording communicates huge swaths of emotion thanks partially to an accompanying orchestra that sounds surprisingly like, coincidentally, that of Gordon Jenkins. However, Ms. Errico and Mr. Firth get the point across with just each other; conveying highly nuanced parallax views of things like clouds, feelings like love, and even more existential concepts like life itself. Ms. Mitchell somehow wrote this amazing song at the age of 26, but she herself wasn’t mature enough to fully effectively interpret it for decades to come. Some songs tell you something, even add to your knowledge, but “Both Sides Now” does precisely the opposite; after experiencing Ms. Errico’s subtle and haunting six-minute reading here, you feel like you really don’t know life at all. Admitting that lack of knowledge is somehow liberating, like a clean slate and a fresh start.Maybe that’s the key to this overall album. Somehow it’s about innocence and experience, both sides now, at the same time. Melissa Errico was Will Friedwald’s guest on the radio show, Sing! Sing! Sing! on San Diego Public Radio for the Valentine’s Day episode of February 14, 2026. You can listen to it here on KSDS Jazz88.org or on the podbean podcast app here.

Melissa Errico’s Lush ‘Dream’ World Redefines the Great American Songbook

Melissa Errico’s Lush ‘Dream’ World Redefines the Great American Songbook

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