Music of the Day, 30 March 2024

regretting some foolish thing

An earlier MotD is undoubtedly responsible for today’s featured artist’s first appearance here. The song is one of my favorites of the band’s hits, though it’s far from their best-known piece.

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was the first single from the Animals’ 1965 album Animal Tracks, although the song was released earlier in the year. While it’s likely that I heard the song back then courtesy of my maternal aunts and uncles, I was a toddler and have no memory of it. My guess is the song resonated with me whenever I got old enough to understand it; growing up, I didn’t really feel like I fit in with my family and fervently wished that I’d find someone who understood me.

I discovered today that “Misunderstood” was actually written for the late great Nina Simone, so of course I had to find a performance by her.

Wow. It’s so very different from the Animals’ version. And it hits me differently too … as if I grok the lyrics more fully because of her slower and more soulful take. I’ve only listened to Simone’s performance a couple of times, but—and I’m surprised to be saying this—I like her rendition better.

Checking my music library, I discovered that I have what appears to be most of an Animals’ greatest hits compilation. The track order and number of songs doesn’t align with any album I’ve found though, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

At first, I was dismayed and frustrated to see that the tracks weren’t labeled by song title, just “track 1.wav,” etc. I thought it would be a fairly quick process to identify each one, but that proved not to be the case. Even for the songs that were instantly identifiable, I just had to listen to the song all the way through … the music is that good. I’d forgotten how talented the Animals were. So now you know why today’s MotD was published so unusually late for me.