Album: Night Beat
Year: 1963
. . .
Recorded over three nights in February 1963, Night Beat was used a small group of musicians — including a 16-year-old Billy Preston on organ — and stands out in his discography as his quietest, most intimate album, bereft of horns, strings and complex vocal arrangements. Especially that last: the only other voices on the record are the musicians joyously shouting the title of “Shake Rattle and Roll.” But the rest of Night Beat? Just Sam Cooke singing his heart out.
And nowhere does he sing his heart out more than “Lost and Looking,” which — in my 1995 reissue called Sam Cooke’s Night Beat — opened up with just Sam singing over Clifford Hils’s bass:
I’m lost and I’m looking for my baby
Wonder why my baby can’t be found
I’m lost and I’m looking for my baby
Lord knows my baby ain’t around
So I’m lost and I’m looking for my baby
Wonder why my baby can’t be found
Lost and I’m searching for my baby
Lord knows my baby ain’t around
Co-Written by Cooke’s business partner J.W. Alexander and Lowell Jordan, “Lost and Looking” sure as shit ain’t much on paper, but good lord, Cooke sings the everliving fuck out of it, without even hardly raising his voice at all. But man, just listen to how he sings “lord knows my baby ain’t around”. It’s so off the charts excellent that the only possible response is swooooooooooon.
I honestly don’t have much more to say: “Lost and Looking” never adds anything new to the arrangement as it moves forward. Nor do the lyrics get any better. It’s the bass and vocals. And that’s all it needs: Sam Cooke is on the short list of greatest singers ever, and “Lost and Looking” is his absolute pinnacle.
And as to why they switched the order of the tracks — as well as the name of the record — on the 1995 reissue of Night Beat, and only the 1995 reissue of Night Beat, is beyond me. On the original version and other reissues, it opens with “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen,” which is fine and all, but “Lost and Looking” is just a whole mood in and of itself and yet also leads brilliantly into the rest of the record.
“Lost and Looking”
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