Wild Is the Wind

Dimitri Tiomkin wrote “Wild Is the Wind” for a 1957 film. Johnny Mathis sang it first. Nina Simone took it apart and put it back together seven minutes at a time at the piano and made it unrecognizable — a song no longer about romance but about the specific devotion you give to someone who isn’t there, and the specific weather such devotion generates inside you.

The song is almost entirely voice and piano. Simone sings the long lines at the edge of her register, letting the vibrato widen until it sounds like she’s shaking. Bowie later covered it, called it one of the greatest songs ever written, and never matched what Simone did with it. Seven minutes of grief for a presence that was never quite there to begin with.