Dream Street

For her 1957 LP Dream Street, Peggy Lee employed the estimable Sy Oliver, who'd arranged many of Ella Fitzgerald’s Decca sessions in the '40s and early '50s. Lee was an expert when it came to setting a mood, and the opening lines of “Street of Dreams” (written in 1932 by Victor Young and Sam M. Lewis) are emblematic of her music career: “Come on and trade in your old dreams for new/Your new dreams for old/I know where they’re bought/I know where they’re sold.” Few singers embodied the ephemeral nature of memory like Lee, whose voice was a substance that seemed to exist in the ether, like smoke or steam. Unlike many of her vocalist contemporaries, she was highly self-directed and unusually creative and adventurous when it came to arrangements. One innovation of Dream Street was the recurrence of the opening bars of “Street of Dreams,” which appear at the start of other songs as a sort of echo. This motif gives the album a haunting continuity and reflects the cyclical design of memory travel, the kind of journey for which Lee serves as an ethereal guide.