Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Bonnie and Clyde of pop, a duo that will break your heart

Imagine the following scene: you are driving an open-top car in broad daylight through Monument Valley, with good company, and suddenly, a fabulous path opens up in a straight line to Sunset Boulevard, where the Hollywood Walk of Fame awaits and all the incandescent lights and night owls of Los Angeles.

Take the path, of course, which is why it has been magically opened for you.

During the trip, you will see how day turns into night as the landscape changes from cowboy to metropolitan, from open countryside to a city that does not sleep.

If you've already imagined it, put on whatever music you want for the trip, but I tell you something: you will be almost impossible to find better music than the one composed by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood.

With this pairing, the car you drive will fly like a dream.

Sinatra & Hazlewood.

A duo between duos.

If they are not the perfect musical couple, at least they were an extraordinary duo, one of the best artistic couples that popular music has ever produced, on par with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in folk or Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in soul. .

Their symbiosis seems born for great adventures.

On the one hand, a young girl, with enormous attractiveness in her mischievous and splendid singing, who has all the genes of her father, Frank Sinatra, well placed.

On the other, a man older than her – 11 years old – who is the counterpart to the girl: darker, more somber, more serious, who embodies a certain danger.

Lee Hazlewood, American singer, songwriter and producer, was hired by Frank Sinatra for one purpose: to improve the commercial presence of his singing daughter.

Hazlewood took charge of production and managed to bring out all the talent that the young Sinatra had within her in the first album she produced,

(1966).

The album has very good versions of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, but it is, above all, the album

an unbeatable song.

However, Sinatra & Hazlewood or Nancy & Lee teamed up to become a couple of singers and it was even better.

It is enough to look at the cover of their debut album,

(1968), to sense that it is a kind of Bonnie and Clyde of American pop.

Two faces that keep their gaze on the listener and seem unconcerned about what is going to happen.

What happens?

Top quality music.

A great order of dramatic pop, understanding by pop what was done in the glorious sixties when the charts were dominated by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Motown or the songs of the Phil Spector factory.

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, recording in a studio.ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nancy & Lee

is a masterpiece, the better of the two albums they recorded.

An album in which Sinatra and Hazlewood masterfully marry brilliant orchestral elements with lyrics that delve into the dark side of the human condition.

Like that trip in the imagined car, the two display a lyrical universe in which feelings are lived on the surface.

They may sing of the glory of fleeting love that are devastatingly alone in romance.

Sinatra's sweet and refined singing blends with Hazlewood's lysergic and spiteful baritone and cowboy voice, which does not stop purring throughout the entire album.

A perfect example:

, a song in which she sings fun and crazy, and he responds with a

somewhat tired and worn out, as if galloping behind her.

Then she responds more foolishly too and he gives her a feline-like growl, immediately answered by a giggle from her.

Everything happens with the impulse of some trembling trumpets, as if they were the engine of that car that the two drive along the endless roads towards the West Coast.

Where Phil Spector around the same time offered epiphanies of street pop, very urban, with that wall of sound throbbing in the pure city, Nancy & Lee are a mix of

and

.

They have a cinematic air with that youthful aspiration of luminous melodies that, covered with bombastic winds and strings, open the songs to a large general plane, in the purest style of John Ford, where there is breadth of the emotional landscape.

Imagine yourself in the car.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood sound.

You can now drive with your eyes closed through Monument Valley to Los Angeles.