I Put a Spell on You

Screamin' Jay Hawkins wrote it drunk in 1956 as voodoo-camp theater; Simone strips off the costume and finds a woman genuinely coming apart. Her version replaces Hawkins' growls and grunts with something worse — restraint that keeps failing. Strings enter first, lush and almost romantic, and then the horns arrive with a hard swing beneath, so the track is simultaneously a ballad and a stomp. Simone begins conversationally, low and slightly weary, and by the bridge she's shouting "I love you, I love you, I love you anyhow" with her voice cracking open at the top, then dropping instantly back to a mutter, as if embarrassed. That whiplash between control and collapse is the entire performance. Her piano is present throughout, comping in blocky classical chords that have no business in a rhythm-and-blues record and are the reason it sounds like nothing else. The lyric admits to possessiveness without apology — a spell cast because the alternative is being left — and Simone refuses to make it charming. It became her signature and the title of her Philips debut, the album where she stopped being a nightclub act. For headphones, at night, when you want someone else to say the ugly thing out loud.