Today the teen site Rookie posted this recording of “Love Letters” by Spoon’s Britt Daniel and wrote:

For this month’s theme song, I sent Britt, who’s a big fan of girl-group pop, half a dozen songs that female teen idols had made popular in the ’50s or ’60s as suggestions/thought-provokers, and he elected to do a take on Shelley Fabares version of “Love Letters” (from her 1962 album, Shelly!).

Fabares’s public image was the very ideal of purity and sweetness, and her songs were all about the rapture of young love—a perfect choice for this month’s theme, Forever.

Daniel himself explained to Rookie: “I knew the Ketty Lester version from ‘Blue Velvet.’ When Divine Fits were touring we would actually play that [over the PA] before we came onstage. Before you sent me the Shelley Fabares version, I never thought [the song] could be made uncreepy.”

Check out all three versions.

Britt Daniels:

Here’s Shelley Fabares 1962 recording:

And here’s Ketty Lester’s version, also from 1962, which was used in “Blue Velvet” and it the best of the three:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-