Album Notes

Excerpts taken from the liner notes of Marieann Meringolo's
CD Hold Me Close –

Marieann's debut album is a mix of great pipes, great
songs and an ingenue's innocence. Sure, she can display an
enormous amount of vocal power – as she does on Rodgers &
Hammerstein's “This Nearly Was Mine” – but she never
forgets there's a song to be sung, a story to be told. The
way the pitch dies slightly on the word “…dreaming;” the fragile note of proud despair that informs the entire
performance…what Marieann is delivering is a dramatic
performance with every song.

In fact, the songs here are all small novelistic
constructs; stories powered by emotion rather than
narrative, but with a mix of musicality and theatricality
that suggest a young Streisand. On “Sometimes,” the Nancy
Daly song about romance and memory, Marieann stirs the
ashes of romance with a touch that's delicate and, at the
same time, crushingly poignant. The song may be right;
it's tough remembering the ardor of lost love. And it's
just as tough forgetting this song.

If I may be so bold, someone should be writing a
Broadway musical around this voice. Listen to the
Lesley Gore-Mark Price love anthem “No One Loves
You Like I do.” It doesn't take long to build to a pitch that
will bring you to your feet. So invite some friends over; it's
far too embarrassing to be giving standing ovations alone
in your own living room.

There are a couple of songs here that have been done
by everyone, in every conceivable fashion, and yet she
attacks them like they've never been sung before – which
is obviously, the only way to do it. One is the Oscar
Hammerstein – Jerome Kern masterpiece, “All the Things
You are,” the greatest love song ever written; the other is
“My Funny Valentine.” It's a chestnut, but she imbues it
with a pain that's palpable.

Marieann cut her musical teeth in the cabarets of
Manhattan. Back then, one of her musical mentors was
Johnny Mathis, and she slips into “Chances Are” like a satin
glove. What happens here – and on the other Mathis
standard – “The Twelfth of Never” – is a fusion of voice and
lyric – an effortless journey to emotional catharsis. It's as
if she's caught in something she can't deny. The singer and
the song are one. It's like, uh, art.

As she exits on the Daryl Kojak – Margaret Emory song
“Threads of Time.” Marieann commits some microtonal
mischief that makes you think: Ordinary humans don't sing
this well this easily. But then, who's saying Marieann
Meringolo is anything but extraordinary? Don't answer.
Just hold me close.

- John Anderson

John Anderson is a writer & critic for Newsday