02 January 2008

that's amore

wonderful song, composed in the yr 1952 and sung by dean martin in 1953 ;]

the song was once played as background music for one of my fav movies which involved the beloved leslie cheung.. but somehow, i didnt really go look up on wad the song title was.. i just liked the melody, and sometimes i would hum it ;]]

now that i found it online, i've decided to air it!! woohoo!!
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here's wad i extracted from wikipedia:

That's Amore" is a 1952 song by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Jack Brooks. It became a major hit for Dean Martin in 1953. Amore means "love" in Italian.

The song first appeared in the soundtrack of the Martin and Lewis comedy film, The Caddy, released by Paramount Pictures on August 10, 1953.

The track that was used for the single released by Capitol Records was recorded on August 13, 1953 (Session 3098; Master 11694-6), with the orchestra conducted by Dick Stabile, at Capitol Records' studios at 5505 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California. On November 7, 1953, Martin's record of the song, with "You're The Right One" (which was recorded at the same session as "That's Amore") on the flip side, peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts. The song was kept from the #1 spot when Les Paul and Mary Ford's Capitol Records single "Vaya Con Dios" returned to the #1 spot after being knocked out by Stan Freberg's Capitol Records single "St. George And The Dragonet", which had been #1 for the past four weeks, after "Vaya Con Dios" had been #1 for the nine previous weeks.

The song remains closely identified with Dean Martin; That's Amore was used as the title for a 2001 video retrospective of Martin's career, and Ricci Martin entitled his 2002 biography That's Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin.

The arrangement of the 1953 hit was scored primarily for mandolins. The lyrics affectionately ridicule the Italian-American ethnic stereotype, with lines like "When the moon hits your eye/Like a big-a pizza pie/That's amore", "When the world seems to shine/Like you've had too much wine/That's amore", and "When the stars make you drool/Just like pasta fazool'/That's amore." Martin did not attempt to deliver the lyrics in an authentic Italian accent, but used the accent of an American trying to mimic Italian pronunciation.

Since the verse starts "In Napoli/where love is king," the setting of the song is Naples, Italy. That is evident in the lyrics (cited, above) that contain what may be called jocularly either the best or the worst rhyme in the history of popular music--that is, the bilingual rhyme of "drool" and "fazool," the Neapolitan dialect word, fasule, for the Italian fagioli--beans.