Ville Valo & Natalia Avelon: Summer Wine
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Summer Wine is a male-female duet made popular by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, released in 1967. The song's theme is the classic "boy meets girl, boy and girl party down and have euphemistically described wild monkey sex, girl rolls passed-out boy, who is left bereft and poorer but wiser." As you do. Little Feat mined this same ground with Dixie Chicken – do you remember any others? Its sister song is undoubtedly the "girl meets boy, girl is promised marriage if she puts out Right This Very Moment, boy cruelly abandons girl, who is left knocked up and single but wiser." In other words, the True Love Waits theme song.
We seem to be posting covers this week, so I'll follow suit. Here's a version from the German movie Das Wilde Leben, about a German rock groupie. Nancy's part is sung by the film's lead actress, Natalia Avelon, and Lee's sad cowboy is now Ville Valo, lead singer of the Finnish alt-metal group HIM, whose deep-voiced babies I'd volunteer to bear even if it ultimately means cruel abandonment and belated musical wisdom.
