2020 was a weird year for everyone, but it was fun, at least at first. The weather was beautiful for what was supposed to be an apocalypse. Spring that year was all blue skies and soft breezes, so being at home meant that I got to spend more time outside in the yard, watching the wisteria flowers bloom on the back fence and soaking up sunshine. Even all the doomsday prep felt more like a game than anything else: it's hard to be grim and serious about wiping down our mail and groceries with diluted bleach water -- or stocking up on something as surreal as toilet paper -- on a completely ordinary sunny day in the middle of April.  

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So it was fine for a while. Fine, until those fun days off slowly started morphing into weeks and months of boredom, where none of us could leave the house outside of grocery shopping. Then we had online classes, which made the days more difficult to keep track of. When the only thing I had to look forward to was sitting at my desk on zoom for a few hours every day, by the beginning of May I was left feeling cramped, lonely, and emotionally exhausted. 

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Worst of all, however, was the news that my prom was canceled. The disappointment creeped up on me subtly. I hadn't been looking forward to prom until I realized I wouldn’t be able to go. To be honest I had barely been looking forward to it at all. I had no boyfriend or friends to ask me to go, or to ask to go with me. The last time I'd asked an acquaintance to a dance had ended in embarrassment for both of us, so I didn’t want to do that either. On top of that, I usually didn’t like the music my high school played at dances. I remember the few times that I’d gone to a dance and had the worst time with the smell, the crowd, the ear-splittingly loud noise. I remember complaining to my family afterwards about how much better the dances would be if they’d played songs that we could actually dance to. But when I found out I wouldn’t be able to go regardless, I was a bit bummed out.  

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I took it in stride the best I could. Even if the loss kind of ate at me after a little bit, I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it. Thankfully though, my family loved me enough to make a big deal out of it for me. On the afternoon my Prom was supposed to have been held, my dad took me out for a nice dinner, with me in my prom dress and a cute little corsage, and him in a nice suit. The food was amazing, and the Uber we took made me feel very fancy.  

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But the best part came when we got home. While we were gone, my mom, my grandmother, and my brother had cleared out the living room, put away the coffee table and rolled up the rug, so the whole room was free floor space. They'd put up a disco ball, and black and gold streamers, and in the dining room there were snacks and cupcakes on the table, and props to take pictures with. And my brother, who is a tad more music-savvy then me, and who’d been listening when I'd been complaining about all the other school dances I'd gone too, hooked up his Spotify to the TV stereo and put on a mix he’d made.  

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We danced for what must have been hours, but the song I remember the most on the playlist was this one. 

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‘Can't Take My Eyes off You’ was released in 1967 by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, a New Jersey based Doowap and Rock-and-Roll band that would become incredibly popular and influential throughout their career. Written by Bob Crew and Bob Gaudio, this song released on their album, ‘Solo’, and it quickly became incredibly popular, rising to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and eventually earning a gold record. Valli’s vocal performance for this track in particular also got him nominated for a Grammy: 1967 Best Vocal Performance of the Year. 

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This song was important for the history of the band as well, as it was one of the first songs that Valli began to phase out of his signature falsetto singing style, to make way for an easier, less demanding style that would be more sustainable for his long-term career.  

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I think the thing that makes ‘Can't Take My Eyes off You’ my favorite is that it's got range, both with the award-winning vocals and the general vibe of the song. It starts with the horns, leading listeners into the beginning of the song with this gentle lull, followed by all the other instruments alongside it. Then Valli's voice comes in, and it’s soft and beautiful, not quite delicate, but definitely soothing, in a way that pairs well with the verse melody and the lyrics (a love song, with a basic premise but a genuine emotion to the lyrics and singing) to make a beautiful swaying serenade, perfect for a romantic slow dance. 

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Then, those same horns bring you into the chorus, quickly filling with energy and excitement and changing the melody to one a little louder, more passionate. The execution of this melody change is perfect: it's all too easy for this kind of shift to come off as disjointed and dissonant, but this change sounds natural and works well with the initial melody and builds the songs energy steadily up until Valli’s part comes in on the chorus.  

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This is the best part of the song. It's loud and passionate and brings the entire song into a louder and more passionate melody that just makes you feel happy, and whether you can dance or not, know all the lyrics or none at all, everyone can at least pretend to belt out Valli’s chorus part. It’s the perfect level of goofy friendly fun, and then it swells into a key change, drops into the verse melody, and then the horns bring you right back into it again!  

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At the end of the day, it's just a great song. That's not to say that any of the other songs on that playlist were bad though, but this one was the one that stuck with me. Remembering that night, all five of us doing our own little dance, singing at the top of our lungs even though none of us knew all the words, and later when it was long past dark out, and grandmother had gone home to bed, and me and my brother just laid on the floor, staring up at the disco ball hanging from the single cord of the fan and taking artsy ‘future album cover’ pictures on our phones, this is the song that I think of. It really made my night. There's not any other way to say it. 

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I still have the playlist, by the way. It's weird to think about that. I still haven't worn the shoes or the dress once since, and the earrings I wore are somewhere in storage. But I have the playlist my brother made saved on Spotify, and I cherish it very much. I still have the corsage, too. Sometime the night after, I put the corsage in my windowsill and forgot it for a couple months. Enough lucky dry days meant it never molded, so instead it just dried and shriveled up, perfectly preserved. Sometimes I'll look at that corsage, or flip through that playlist, and I'll remember what a nice night I had. It was really fun.