Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You

Nina Simone had already proven she could do almost anything with a song, but I Put a Spell on You, released on Philips Records in 1965, is where she turned that range into a genuine signature. The title track began as Screamin' Jay Hawkins' theatrical, ironic shock number, all growls and gimmick, but Simone stripped away the camp and rebuilt it as a thrilling, string-and-horn-laden love song, so completely reimagined that it became one of her own defining recordings rather than a cover.

That transformation runs through the whole album. Working with arrangers Horace Ott and Hal Mooney, along with guitarist Rudy Stevenson, Simone moves from the aching French ballad "Ne Me Quitte Pas" to the now-standard "Feeling Good," a song she turned into something so definitive that it's since become one of the most covered and sampled recordings in modern music. Her voice, a rich, expressive contralto shaped by rigorous classical training, particularly her lifelong devotion to Bach, gives even the record's lighter moments a weight and control most pop and jazz singers of the era simply didn't have.

As a singer, pianist, and civil rights activist working fluidly across classical, jazz, blues, folk, gospel, and pop, Simone used albums like this one to prove genre boundaries meant little to her. I Put a Spell on You captures that fusion at its most fully realized, and it remains one of the essential entry points into her catalog six decades later.

This vinyl LP pressing brings one of Simone's most enduring records back to the format built for it.