The title of Errico’s album, and evening, is a homage to her favorite film noir, 1947’s Out of the Past. “It’s a great movie with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas,” she says. “They’re both in love with her, and she’s a wicked woman.” It ends badly. Not for nothing is it a noir.
“That is the whole sensibility of the record, and I had many, many mad scientists who helped me pull together this list. I worked with Michael Feinstein, Jeremy Sams, Adam Gopnik—lots of great musical intellectuals who helped me choose the songs.”
The idea for this collection came to her during the past two years of enforced inactivity. “All through the height of the pandemic, when the world was locked away in lonely rooms, the world was watching movies. I returned to one of my obsessions—film noir. That genre felt mysteriously current. It’s really the art of being isolated and alone, of longing and maybe mistrust and feeling the world is corrupt. This aesthetic came out of the Second World War. I thought, ‘Isn’t it amazing to have World War II end and have this kind of dark art get made?’”
In addition to established noirs, Errico commissioned a few songs—”sort of neo-noir,” she calls it. Dory Langdon Previn added lyrics to David Raksin’s haunting The Bad and the Beautiful. “Marlowe’s Theme,” which David Shire wrote for 1976’s Farewell, My Lovely (Mitchum again, as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe), gets words from Gopnik. The latter collaborated with the late Peter Foley on a modern theatrical noir song written last year, “On Vit, On Aime.”
Michel Legrand, who put Errico on Broadway in Amour, also makes a posthumous contribution via a theme he wrote for Jacques Demy’s 1970 Peau d’Ane (Donkey Skin). Thanks to English lyrics from Sams, the song—“Amour, Amour”—rates a world premiere. “It’s a very hypnotic, swirling, difficult song,” Errico says. “Very similar to Legrand’s ‘Windmills of Your Mind.’”
The CD concludes with a Feinstein suggestion: Lionel Newman and Dorcas Cochran’s “Again,” delivered huskily by Ida Lupino in 1948’s Roadhouse. (Critiqued co-star Celeste Holm about Lupino’s singing: “She does more without a voice than anybody I’ve ever heard”).
“It’s a wonderful song, and I use it thematically,” Errico says. “It’s a turn down a more affirmative ending, as if my album had a kind of shape—from flirtatious mystery to real despair to the light of hope. I feel that ‘Again’ is a song with a glimmer, a flicker, of hope.”