Wine and Cheese: Billie Holiday and The Cure
Billie Holiday and The Cure wield poetic lyricism and solemn melodies to enliven pensive, wistful pining that stretches genres, decades, and continents.
It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.
Written by Kaileen Rooks
Photos courtesy of Herman Leonard and James McCauley
With every generation, teenagers rediscover the angsty music that formerly fulfilled their parents’ cravings for an all-encompassing, yet romantic melancholy. Some music-obsessed youth look for this emotional catharsis in bands chock-full of weepy white boys from suburban England, like The Cure or The Smiths. Where these teens err is restricting themselves to a few bands from one genre, failing to realize what they seek exists across a wide range of music, especially in blues and jazz. Billie Holiday might be restricted to little more than “elevator music” by snot-nosed indie boys with superiority complexes and nicotine addictions, but her music and the Cure’s share one foundational similarity — they echo a profoundly human cry for love and intimacy.
The Cure started similarly to the many other grimy boy bands from the new wave genre: in a middle-class English suburban garage. Their career began immersed in the world of stripped-down, rough-and-tumble post-punk but soon took on unique lyricism that roils with literary references and philosophical pessimism that made them the face of gothic rock: a new, somber genre emerging from the steaming black ashes of the punk era. As their career progressed, the sound turned poppier but remained true to their definitive balance between depression and saccharine romanticism. The Cure’s eyeliner-smudged music swayed and bobbed like a boat on a troubled, angsty ocean. They vacillate between nihilistic depression and gooey, doe-eyed lust and devotion, but the core of the band rests on how they use the two in conjunction to convey love.
While The Cure bobs and weaves around the idea of love, Billie Holiday uses her voice to express the nuance of love. When Billie first heard the records of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, she was still Eleanora Fagan, a poor 12 year old girl running errands for a brothel in Baltimore. Only three years later, in 1929, Fagan would take her love of Armstrong’s improvisation and Smith’s vocal intonation to the nightclubs of Harlem. Her performances quickly catapulted her to the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, and she released her first recording in 1933, at just 18 years old. As her career progressed into massive commercial success, Fagan’s vocal style, while remaining true to her scat-happy bluesy roots, adopted a distinctive, velvety jazz tone that would inspire many jazz stars of the coming years, notably Frank Sinatra and Etta James. Holiday serves as a bridge between the blues and jazz. She brings a bluesy swagger and youthful lightness to the genre, softening it out into a smooth, complex interpretation of jazz. In a radio interview available at the New York Jazz Museum, Holiday said she wanted to sound “like an instrument.” Using her timbre ways that highlight her vocal abilities,and melding her voice cohesively with the instrumentation, Holiday weaves herself into the fabric of their composition. In “My Old Flame - Take 2,” she shows off her decadent vibrato, sliding behind the band’s slow beat, and then gliding in front of it, just to fall back in line right at the end of a verse. Her voice commands the instrumentation, accentuating it when need be, and overtaking it at the same time. Holiday’s melodies perform a luxurious waltz with her brass accompaniment, demonstrating her unparalleled dexterity for melding vocal and instrumental artistry.
Holiday’s vocals are not uniform. In songs like “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “I’m a Fool to Want You,” she purrs and murmurs, cradling the microphone with her timbre as her lover in the flesh. In tracks like “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Love Me or Leave Me” , she wails into the mic, evoking powerful baritones and gravelly emotions of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, two of her major influences. Fagan’s rage and ability are yet to be paralleled in the modern jazz world, or even music itself. Unlike The Cure, her versatility came through technical skill rather than her subject matter. Still, Holiday and The Cure both continually track back to an intricate exploration of love and all its melancholic mysteries.
On the subject of pessimistic romance, Billie Holiday’s “Solitude” is a testament to loneliness and love. “With gloom everywhere / I sit and I stare,” emphasizes resignation to anguish, similar to despondent melodies of The Cure’s vocalist and songwriter Robert Smith. Amidst the agony, she softens encroaching sadness with a desperate plea: “Dear lord above / Send me back my love.” She begs for a volatile source of contentment, even while consumed by utter misery. Holiday’s voice bends and curves, winding around the delicate piano and a saxophone’s serene drawl. This creates a dreamy atmosphere that harmonizes tranquil melancholy with honey-sweet devotion.
Even on purely goth records, The Cure blends depression and adoration á la Holiday. Reflecting the tumultuous personal lives of the band’s ever-changing lineup, their early album Pornography explores the conflicting pull between anger and love. Even on a track not explicitly highlighting romantic love, melancholy meets human tenderness in “One Hundred Years,” Smith balances blunt nihilism and anti-war political rhetoric with moments of human tenderness. In the first verse, Smith asserts that “It doesn’t matter if we all die” but still refers back to his lover’s laughter, calling it “A prayer for something better.” The pessimist anthem is shot through with a message of human warmth inescapable from The Cure’s entire discography. Drummer and keyboardist Lawrence “Lol” Tolhurst’s influence is heavy; his drums and keyboard thump rapidly, followed closely by the stinging, pulsating riffs of Simon Gallup’s bass.
The punishing beat and bitter, gloomy mood of “One Hundred Years” harshly contrasts lilting instrumentation and buttery vocals on “Solitude,” but both are tied down by the dichotomy between heartache and affection.
Both artists are overwhelmingly pessimistic when confronting the inherent danger of love. “That Ole Devil Called Love” from Holiday’s 1945 B-side ” warns listeners of the omnipresent threat that is romantic love. Holiday describes herself as a victim of this relentless foe, ignoring the “tears / And those rocks in my heart,” and luring her into his treacherous grasp with “that siren song.” Operatic and graceful, Holiday’s vocals combine a mellow, amorous melody with focused, penetrating inflections that complement the orchestral flourishes that ebb and flow.
The Cure regularly laments the evils of love, though, true to form, putting a macabre spin on it. In “The Kiss,” a slow-burning instrumental prelude that culminates in a short, demented verse, Smith begs his lover to kiss and love him while simultaneously accusing them of torturing him. He howls that their “tongue’s like poison / So swollen it fills up my mouth.” Strident, rippling riffs make up the bulk of the track. A nearly 3-minute-long dramatic solo by guitarist Porl Thompson builds up spine-tingling suspense, climaxing in Smith’s theatrical diatribe. Soft melancholy surfaces in nearly all of Holiday and The Cure’s albums, but these two songs express a particular anger that leaves no room for nuance or forgiveness.
Aside from anger and sadness, what most substantially connects these two artists is a sense of yearning — a hunger for the same level of adoration that they are so willing to dedicate to others. “A Letter to Elise” is probably the closest The Cure has ever gotten to producing a Holiday-esque ballad. A few guitars and a 6-string bass carry the track. Smith, backed by Perry Bamonte (another guitarist), sings an ode to the tragic nature of love. He beseeches his lover, crying out that “I know I’ll never really get inside of you / To make your eyes catch fire the way they should.” He mourns his ill-fated love affair, with impassioned fervor and woe. On the other end of the spectrum, , “Lover, Come Back To Me” is one of Lady Day’s more upbeat tracks, with jaunty percussion and brass that clearly reflects Holiday’s blues influences. However, her lyrics sharply contrast with bouncy, jovial tunes of instrumentation. “This aching heart of mine is singing,” she croons, imploring her lover to return to her, to quell her heartache. Even as the piano breezes along a summery, cheerful tune, Holiday waxes poetic about her loneliness and misfortunes with love. Her vocals, coy, contemplative, and luscious all at once, reflect that all too familiar pain of doomed love.
Nothing so grounds humanity together like shared experience, and there is no shared experience quite so pervasive and addicting as love. Billie Holiday and The Cure are just two of the countless musical talents that have attempted to sum such a thing up in a song. Where they both shine is their remarkable ability to express love in a manner that is nuanced and passionate to the listener. This ability is largely thanks to the respective vocal abilities of Holiday and Robert Smith, whose vocal talents epitomized their respective genres. Their seamless balance between despondency and longing captures the complexity of how love is experienced. Their music is a genuine expression of the complexity of love — and this complexity is what ties them together across an ocean of differences.