Old Fashioned Love Songs

Love songs can be tailored to fashion. They come in whatever style is current, and while they may sound different in those various styles, they remain love songs because love, at least as an emotional construct, is immutable. In the end, one is either in love or out of love, and the urge to sing about it all appears to be innate. This three-disc, 63-track collection of love songs from the 1950s and '60s can be termed “old-fashioned” only because styles and fashions change -- the concept of love doesn’t. If the artists compiled here -- Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Cilla Black, and Skeeter Davis, to name just a few -- tend to croon more than they shout, growl, or rap when the subject is love, then what is being said is all the same. It’s the nature of love songs, old-fashioned or not.