Out of the Dark The Film Noir Project Digital Album

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, with all the world locked away in lonely rooms and only old movies to watch at midnight, singer and author Melissa Errico suddenly returned to one of her life-long obsessions – noir! That dark, disturbing sensibility of intractable fatalism that Paris existentialists discovered in American film in the nineteen forties, and that runs as a mesmerizing, mysterious current through modern movies and modern music alike. Along with her collaborator Adam Gopnik, she curated a series of film noir classics at New York’s FIAF, appeared in the New York Times with an essay on having a black sequined gown specially made to play the role of the femme fatale on stage and offered Manhattan a concert of noir songs.

Now, her recording “Out Of The Dark: The Film Noir Project” brings together all of those threads in a single masterly sequence, a song cycle that offers an unforgettably sexy, sensual, and sophisticated arc, all black-velvet piano and vibraphone tones, telling a complete story of hope, despair, and hope renewed. In no sense a retro project, her choices reach from noir classics, like Laura and The Bad and The Beautiful, into the French chansons of the fifties and sixties, and includes the debut of four entirely new songs, by Michel Legrand, David Shire, and the late Peter Foley, all with arrangements by her musical director, pianist Tedd Firth.

Errico’s dream was to paint a picture of an era now made mythological – the world of the 52nd Street jazz club, of the doomed and unfathomable chanteuse, of nightclub gangsters and exiled French poets – that would somehow speak to today’s condition. “Did you ever have the feeling that the world has gone and left you behind?” she sings in the rarely recorded verse of Matt Dennis’ “Angel Eyes” – and at a time when that feeling has become so universal, she sends us back into the past and forward into the future to affirm, as one new song suggests, that “darkness is all we have to show the shapes that light can make.”