Little Anthony teams with country artist Brooke Moriber for a new take on his beloved golden oldie.
Call it an inspired new take on a beloved golden oldie, and you’ll be right on target.
Of course, it helped a lot that legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Anthony (a.k.a. Jerome Gourdine) was in the mix for the effective and affecting reimagining of “Hurt So Bad,” a song he charted on the Top Ten in 1965 as lead singer of Little Anthony and the Imperials.
But it helped just as much that Anthony recorded the new version of the ballad originally written by Teddy Randazzo, Bobby Weinstein, and Bobby Hart with Brooke Moriber, an immensely talented singer-songwriter whose credits range from Broadway smashes — she landed the role of Young Cosette in Les Misérables at age 8 — to well-received country music releases.
For once, you can believe the hype. Produced by Fred Mollin — the music industry heavyweight behind acclaimed recordings for Johnny Mathis, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Ray Cyrus, Natalie Cole, and Dan Hill — this reboot, as the press notes proclaim, “transforms the iconic track into a heartfelt conversation between two people watching each other move on while still longing for a second chance. Featuring lush instrumentation and soaring vocal harmonies, the duet captures the raw vulnerability of heartbreak while honoring the emotional intensity of the original.”
Yes, indeed.
“It’s a highlight of my career,” Anthony recently told C&I. “From a creative level, not a commercial level. Commercial is all boom, everything goes great, and then you sell a bunch of records. No, from a creative level, it’s great work.
“And don’t think it would’ve happened with another singer. It was the right place, the right time — yeah, it’s all about timing. She was the right voice to match together with my voice … And that actually freed me up. It gave me the freedom to say, OK, let me just be me, and let her do what she wants to do.”
“What’s so great about this recording,” Brooke added, “ is that this song has never been done as a duet before. And it actually works really well, because the arrangement for it was that it starts really small and gets really big.
“So from an actor’s perspective — since I also used to be an actor, and I know that Anthony is an actor, too — we approached it as, ‘Well, I’m hurting more than you are.’ ‘No, I’m hurting more than you.’ ‘No, me. I’m hurting more. I’m really hurting.’ And then you absolutely end the song where it's just boom.’ And that’s why it works so great as a duet.”
According to Anthony, when he initially discussed approach he and Brooke might take to the song with producer Mollin, “Fred said, ‘OK, you take the first verse.’ And I said, ‘Nah, I don't think so. I think she should set it up.’ Because, really, the vision in my mind — and I guess I must have sold it to Fred — was this is a girl, this is a guy, and the girl is saying, ‘Boy, did you hurt me!’ And the guy’s going, ‘No, you hurt me worse.’
“It’s almost like these two people are trying to say in the lyric, ‘This this is how bad it was.’ And I’m going back to her saying, ‘Well, you think it was bad for you? It’s bad for me. Like needles and pins. It was that bad.’ When Fred heard that, he said, ‘Yo, that might be the thing to do.’ And so we did.”
Brooke admits she was a tad nervous about doing a duet with a living legend. But she quickly recognized that he viewed her as a creditable professional. Just as she recognized he was a terrific partner.
“Anthony’s one of the most humble, wonderful, inspiring human beings that I’ve ever met,” she said. “He just made me feel so at ease in the studio with him. And the fact that he can still sing in a woman’s range at age 84 allowed me to do things with my voice that in another duet with another man I could never do. Because I couldn’t go to the high places that I can go, and start really low, go really high, and just go all over the place. It allowed me so much freedom to just embrace what vocal colors I could bring to this song.
“We just were feeding off of each other, and coming up with ideas as we were recording. It was really, really special.”
And here is the end result of that marvelous collaboration.
