This week’s tune is Irving Berlin’s Let’s Face the Music  and features a new singer on this site, Mary Ellen Desmond.

  I don’t know how our paths did not cross sooner, both of us working twenty years or more in the same city, but I did not meet singer Mary Ellen Desmond until a couple of months ago when I was called at the last minute to accompany her at her regular Thursday night gig at Philadelphia’s L2 restaurant.

  I sympathize, but am nonetheless grateful for the other guy’s flu.  Working with Mary Ellen was fun and easy from the get go.  She has a great feel and lovely colors to her voice and I am pleased to be working more with her, off and on at L2 and elsewhere. (See Gigs).

  Since I live around the corner from L2, Mary Ellen dropped by last Thursday before her job and we hurriedly did Let’s Face the Music.  I say hurriedly in two senses.  One was that I had prepared an arrangement that moves at a much faster clip than when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers original version in the 1936 movie Follow the Fleet.  We were going to try some different tempos and some different tunes, but well, we didn’t have time.  She’ll be back soon though with a ballad or two.

  In the meantime, click above to hear Let’s Face the Music.  The lyrics are below. 

 There may be trouble ahead,

But while there’s moonlight and music

And love and romance

Let’s face the music and dance.

Before the fiddlers have fled,

Before they ask us to pay the bill

And while we still

Have the chance

Let’s face the music and dance.

Bridge:

Soon, we’ll be without the moon

Humming a different tune

And then

There may be teardrops to shed.

So while there’s moonlight and music

And love and romance

Let’s face the music and dance.