Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Runaway” by Del Shannon:

This was a number one hit in 1961. It’s about as bleak as they come. As Bob Stanley writes in Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: “The lyric was beyond melancholy, filled with dread and paranoia; the runaway girl might not even be alive.” That chugging rhythm is great, and Max Crook is playing his homemade “musitron” which makes this (probably, maybe, I think) the first hit to use a synthesizer, or at least a synthesizer of sorts. The “why-why-why-why-why” is really what makes this song, though: the falsetto makes it sound like uncontrollable agony, curiously, in the same way that the Beach Boys would later use falsetto to create a sound of uncontrollable joy on song like “I Get Around.”