Can’t Nobody Love You - written by Jimmy Mitchell - sung by The Zombies
In the voice of Rod Argent lies the onset of Summer. No one knows why, but he doesn’t have a Winter voice, just plain and simple. His voice does, however, contain traces of the vague, endless drudge of wintertime in south England with a cathartic note of all the rain and clouds clearing up, of better, more pleasant times ahead.
Rod Argent's vocals hang somewhere in purgatory, between two seasons, between two life stages, a tone that contains the longing of someone who’s departed something miserable and has only almost arrived someplace peaceful, as if he’s falling backward in mid-air, grasping for what he wants and needs, coming close yet reaching nothing at all.
I like a lot of his covers, none more than the rest, but today I’ve arbitrarily picked this one. Maybe because the song’s theme — a man convincing himself that no one is capable of loving as well as he can — is a solipsistic delusion emblematic of Argent’s unique voice; a perfect match for the singer’s tone. Or perhaps because it’s an egoistic delusion that hits very close to home, not just for me, but for thousands of pseudo-masculine suckers that span the face of the earth. At the end of the day, all we, men, have is delusion, which is to say, all we have is wistfulness, the absence of anything concrete.