"You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me"

Vintage sheet music for
"You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me"
words and music by
Sammy Fain,
Irving Kahal
and Pierre Norman
from The Big Pond (1930)

*(The British Edition of the sheet music also published by
The Famous Music Corporation
but "printed in England"
specifies on the cover
(though not on the interior title page), "Words by Irving Kahal
Music by Sammy Fain &
Pierre Norman"

Maurice Chevalier introduced "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" in The Big Pond a 1930 film starring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert. Chevalier plays a Frenchman working in Venice as a tour guide. When he meets Colbert's character, the daughter of an American who has made his fortune in chewing gum, he romances her with "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me." Later in the movie, Chevalier and Colbert reprise the song as a duet while on shipboard travelling back to the states to get married.

Chevalier and Colbert reprise "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" at the conclusion of The Big Pond. (Colbert, not noted for her singing, is likely dubbed.)

David Cairn (film critic at MUBI.com) is not a fan of Maurice Chevalier or of the ubiquity of "You Brought A New Kind of Love To Me" in The Big Pond (1930), except for the fact that the song's use in the 1930 film led to its reappearance in the 1931 Marx Brothers movie, Monkey Business to very funny effect. He writes:

Chevalier sings two songs [in The Big Pond ]. "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" ("If the nightingales could sing like you / They'd sing much sweeter than they do") gets so many renderings, as gondola serenade and shipboard duet, and picked up by swank party band and street organ grinder, that it seeps into the brain cells like formaldehyde. No wonder the Marx Brothers felt the urge to beat it to death in Monkey Business . Ironically, Claudette Colbert never could sing a note, and her dubbing here must be one of the earliest examples of the craft. Later [in the film], Chevalier introduces "Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight," best known for its eccentric falsetto cover version by Tiny Tim.

As for the inclusion of "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" in Monkey Business, the director's motive for the scene that features the song were probably less how tiresome the song became in The Big Pond and more how eminently the Chevalier persona lent itself to farcical satire, as well as the popularity of the song itself which by the time Monkey Business was released had already made it onto the charts by three artists and had been recorded by many more. Notably there were records by Chevalier himself and by a young Bing Crosby with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, this last making it as high as number 3. Ethel Waters also had a popular "blue" version out. The song was virtually as ubiquitous on the American scene as it was in the film and so seemed ready-made to poke fun at, especially with a Chevalier accent.

In Monkey Business, the Marx Brothers are stowaways on a transatlantic crossing (reminiscent, in this way and some others, of The Big Pond). The Brothers, however, are not, at least at first, singing "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" on the moonlit deck of an ocean liner, but rather are first encountered below deck hiding from the Captain and crew in four empty barrels marked "Kippered Herring." Once discovered, they are off on a frenzied series of madcap misadventures on shipboard that take up more than half of the film. When the ship finally enters New York Harbor and they need passports to disembark, luck has it that Zeppo has gotten his hands on the passport of the famous French singer/actor Maurice Chevalier -- who never even makes a "live" appearance in the film. In order to fool the customs agent into believing he is Chevalier, even though he bears no resemblance to the passport photo, Zeppo volunteers an imitation of the Frenchman singing his current hit, "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me." In fact before the scene is over all four brothers try their hand at doing a "Chevalier" by singing the first lines of the song, lines that were widely know at the time from Chevalier's hit recording as well as from his rendition in The Big Pond: "If the nightingales could sing like you / They'd sing much sweeter than they do." Even the mute Harpo manages an attempt by lip-synching the lyric to the Chevalier recording that is playing on a phonograph strapped to his back. The verisimilitude of Harpo's hilarious rendition is betrayed only when the hand-cranked machine begins to run down.

Here is a soundtrack recording from the CD, At the Movies, The Marx Brothers, Vol.2 of the scene from Monkey Business described above.

According to Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson in their book The Songs of Hollywood, The Marx Brothers, at their new studio, Paramount, had had most of their songs cut from their previous movie Animal Crackers because the studio saw them as superfluous and expensive, cutting them despite the brothers' protests that their Broadway and vaudeville successes had depended on the unique combination of comedy and music in their routines. As a result, only "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me" and another Fain/Kahal/Norman Song, "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" (performed by Chico at the piano) survived, the latter only barely, in the final cut of Monkey Business (p. 112).

In the 1963 Paul Newman / Joanne Woodward movie A New Kind of Love, the 1956 Sinatra recording of the song to which the movie title alludes is played over the credits.

"When I Take My Sugar
To Tea"
words and music by
Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman originally published 1931

Gary Marmorstein informs us that "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" was the "first successful movie song" written by the team of Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal though they had several songs published independently of the movies during the twenties. The two had met in New York in 1927 and had an immediate success with "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella." Like Fain, Kahal was a singer. Marmorstein writes that their first efforts at writing songs together were "conventional" and so, he adds, was "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me," except it had an "up-the-down-staircase construction [that] was so winning it was immediately absorbed into the standard repertoire." After this song, the two continued to work together successfully at both Paramount and Warner Brothers studios until Kahal died at age thirty-seven in 1942.

Marmorstein adds a coda to the story of "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" by telling the tale of its third songwriter, Pierre Norman who had also joined Fain and Kahal for both words and music on the song "When I take My Sugar to Tea." Norman, like Kahal, was born in Pennsylvania. He started life with the name Joseph Pierre Connor and along with studying music took up theology becoming a priest while making his living writing movie songs. As Marmorstein puts it, his career as a songwriter for the movies became one of the "oddest cases of moonlighting to come out of Hollywood." When he died in 1952, Marmorstein notes, he had devoted himself exclusively to his priestly duties though his estate was significantly enlarged by his royalties from songs like "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me," which, as it turns out, was written by a Catholic priest and two Jews. When songwriting seemed to dry up for Connor/Norman, he returned to the East Coast and became a chaplain for the New Jersey State Police (Hollywood Rhapsody pp. 58-59).

Click here to read the lyrics for "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me" as sung by Frank Sinatra on his V-Disc album . Frank, like most singers of this song, does not include the verse . Because Sinatra does not include the verse, it is transcribed below as sung by the composer Sammy Fain in his 1930 recording, which can be heard in The Record/Video Cabinet in the right column of this page. Sweet one, fairer than the flowers, Never will I meet one sweeter than you. Would you turn away or Could you really learn to care if I'd ever dare To say I love you? Of the remaining performances on this page, only two include the verse. Doris Day in her 1952 recording sings the same version as Fain does -- the same version found in the original sheet music published in 1930 by Famous Music. Interestingly, however, Ethel Waters in her 1930 recording, uses an entirely different verse, the origin of which we have not as yet discovered. She opens "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" with the following: Love Dreams, I remember love dreams, While the moon above beams, I think of you. Now sung, I recall our love song And the lips that spoke With a kiss that woke Life and love anew. (our transcription from the music video) . Ethel Walers "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" (1930) with variant lyrics in opening verse and refrain Portions of the lyric in the refrain as Waters sings it, are also unique, and for two reasons: First she creates a "blue" effect by means of hitting a series of accented beats in the refrain with a force and rhythm that sounds and feels a whole lot like sex. And the words she sings with these accents are not to be found in the original sheet music published by Famous Music Corp. in 1930, or in other recorded versions we have heard. Either she created them herself or someone wrote them, perhaps specifically for this recording. In any cse, it goes like this: Now babe tell me true What did you do To bring this new kind of love to me? Oh, what must I say When I feel this way Since you brought that new kind of love to me? Each word in the first and second lines just above receive a very strong emphasis as do those in the forth and fifth lines creating a drum-like staccato breathlessness. She closes the song by adding a couple of more accented words: I'll work , slave the whole day through / If I could say it's all for you, / For you Brought a new kind of love to me. This "new kind of love" seems certainly to be the sensuality she has discovered with her "king"and in turn shared with us her audience through her singing.

• Frank Sinatra, 1956: SinatraFan64
• Maurice Chevalier and Chevalier and Claudette Colbert in The Big Pond: perfectjazz78
• David Kerr Canastra Trio

Notes

• Other songs written for The Big Pond currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook : none.
• For a complete listing of songs used in the movie, The Big Pond , see IMDB soundtrack .
• Maurice Chevalier sings "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" to Claudette Colbert in The Big Pond (1930)
• Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson, The Songs of Hollywood , Oxford UP, 2010 .
• "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" in the Movies
• from the soundtrack of Monkey Business
• Gary Marmorstein Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and Its Makers, 1900-1975 , New York: Schirmer Books, 1997

Cite this page: "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/x-y-z/you_brought_a_new_kind_of_love_to_me.html